The term core is often associated with the muscles around the abdomen, but core applies to every area of your life, including your vision. Understanding how core is related to vision will allow you to have improved vision as you age instead of going down the common path in the opposite direction.

Core is like your foundation. Core muscles keep you stable. They create leverage and stability. Power, on the other hand, allows you to do high intensity work. A distance runner relies on core muscles and a sprinter develops power muscles. We are built to work at low intensity most of the day with short sprints of power. It is the interaction between core and power that allows you to move effectively, and it is the interaction between core and high intensity vision that allows you to see well.

You have three types of vision. Peripheral vision is of low resolution. It allows you to react to things coming at you from either side, above, or below. Peripheral vision is blocked out the degree to which you are focused on something in front of you. For now, we are going to ignore peripheral.

The other two types of vision are for seeing things in front of you. They are related to a part of the retina, called the macula, that has a higher density of nerve receptors, which provides the potential to perceive a higher resolution than would be possible with peripheral vision.

The macula is designed for normal resolution. You should be able to do almost everything, including recognizing faces, cooking, and even reading normal sized font with images projecting onto your macula. I call this type of vision core vision because it is the normal vision. It can be maintained for long periods without much strain.

Within the macula is a small area with an even higher density of light receptors called the fovea. The fovea allows great detail of perception. If you wanted to explore your fingerprint, or do anything requiring high intensity focus, your lens can direct that image to your fovea. While focusing on this tiny detail, your peripheral and even normal macular vision is inhibited.

The key to good vision is not just focusing images on your fovea. In fact, if your vision is poor, you always have to use your fovea go get enough resolution to make sense out of what you are seeing. Essentially, this is the reason most people end up with glasses. Constant reliance on the lens to work hard to focus for long periods ends up forcing the lens to adapt to the focused position permanently because the muscles are not capable of holding the lens in that position indefinitely.

If you were to develop your medium resolution vision, being the macular vision, your eyes would not have to strain for long periods. The lens would be relatively relaxed, and occasionally you would zoom in for a few seconds only to zoom out again. The normal mobility of the lens would be maintained.

The purpose of our vision program is not to strengthen the fovea aspect of your vision. That tends to be overemphasized already in an age of video ipods and laptop computers. Actually if you were to strengthen your fovea vision you would insure eventual dependence on corrective lenses. Instead, we want to strengthen your core so your lens can relax.