Three Questions with Meghann Koppele Duffy

Episode 26 - Vision Check: How Your Eyes Shape Movement, Strength, and Awareness

• Meghann • Episode 26

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When you think about strength, awareness, or even balance, do you ever think about your eyes?

In this episode of Three Questions, I explore how vision impacts movement, strength, and body awareness in ways most people never consider. From why closing one eye can change your balance to how a simple pencil can unlock pushups you thought were impossible, you’ll see just how much your visual system drives performance.

In the episode, you’ll hear:
 ✅ How your eyes act as one of your biggest sensory inputs for safety and movement
 ✅ Why your “dominant” eye might not actually be your most accurate eye
 ✅ A test to see if your vision is secretly holding back your strength

Whether you’re a movement professional, an athlete, or just someone who wants to feel more confident in your body, this episode will help you understand your eyes as a powerful driver of movement and show you why training your eyes could be the missing link in your progress.

Resources mentioned:
Episode 3: Your Eyes Do More Than See
Find a Neuro Studio Teacher Near You
Connect with me on Instagram
Connect with me on Threads

Meghann Koppele Duffy: Welcome to Three Questions where critical thinking is king, and my opinions and research are only here to support your learning and hopefully deeper understanding. Hey, I'm your host Meghann, and I'm really honored you clicked on Three Questions today so we can talk about your eyes. Now, I talk about eyes a lot to my clients.

To my family members, basically to anybody who will listen. And rather than lecturing you all about doing more eye exercises and why they're important, I wanna ask you three questions so you can determine what part of this is meaningful to you. And maybe after this episode, you can walk away with an actionable strategy to incorporate more visual exercises into your day and understand why they're so important.

So let's get right into it, shall we? Question one. When was the last time you closed your eyes when you weren't napping or sleeping? Think about it. When was the last time? Some of you might be like, oh, I do it every day when I meditate. Okay, you guys are showing off. Um, but seriously, do you close your eyes when you're trying to concentrate?

Do you close your eyes when you're trying to listen more or actually understand what someone's talking about? Do you close your eyes when you're exercising? Do you close your eyes sometimes in your Pilates class or weight training class? But other times you wouldn't even dare to do that. So really think about.

And maybe the rest of your day. All I want you to notice is those moments when you close your eyes. Now, why is this important? Well, number one, our eyes are a huge, huge giver of sensory information to our brain. And what the hell does that mean? Well, our brain needs to make choices about how we move and how we interact.

They're with the world and our eyes give our brain a lot of information about where we are, how close we are to things, how far away we are to things, how close we are to danger, how far away from danger. Um, maybe it's even our eyes give our brain information about how many steps we need to take to get from here to there, or if something comes into our visual field.

Our eyes are going to tell our brain to get the hell out of the way. Now, if anybody has been walking and a bee has flown by you, um, is that just me or do I like jump and freak out now because that bee came into our visual, visual fields very fast and it startled us, our brain might have an exaggerated response also sometimes in an actual traumatic.

Moment in your life, maybe you thought you saw something was about to happen, but you're like, that can't be actually happening and you have a delay in response. Or maybe sometimes your body freezes. So our eyes give our brain so much information. But what I think is really cool, and maybe you will, maybe you won't, is that what we see isn't the only information our eyes are taking in.

When I learned this, I literally was like, yo, thanks eyes, thanks brain. Because if you've met me or listened to me, my brain takes in a lot of information. I observe everything. Um, some might say I observe too many things. And I might talk fast, but that's because my brain is able to take in a lot of information fast and process it.

That doesn't mean it's in a way that it can be delivered so that other people understand it. Then there's other people, some of which are very important. People in mine, in my life, I won't name any names, but their brain takes in a lot of information, but they might need more time to organize that information.

That doesn't mean that their brain is worse or better than mine. It's just different. So let's all just thank our eyes for being able to filter out bad information to, from just taking in and really thank your brain for organizing that information and removing things that the brain doesn't think is important.

So our eyes are complex and they do more than see, okay, something I'm not great at is spatial awareness, right? Many of you know, if you've listened to my podcast, I have some. Auditory issues in my left ear. I don't know if it's from post my concussions, my first concussion when I was 19, or maybe I was born with that.

But I don't think I speak loudly, and I know that's hysterical to everybody who meets me, but for me, I don't hear it. My brain doesn't process it that way. So I've had to become really good at reading people's body language. So when somebody kind of leans away from me, I know, dude, yo, you're too close and you might be too loud.

I don't realize that I'm too close to people. And if you're any of my friends from Scranton, that's where I went for my undergrad. Um, there is a, uh, I'll just, I'll just shoot it to you straight. And when I drink, I tend to be a closer talker and, um, I may or may not spit when I talk and I may or may not drop my drink, to which I warn everybody.

And when I do it, we all have a good laugh. My motor control gets worse. Happens to a lot of people when they drink. So, you know, there's a little something about me. So back to the eyes. Okay, our eyes are a big, big sensory input, but think about how hard our eyes are working and now even think about being at a computer all day long.

Now, I don't think it's computers that are ruining our eyes. It's the amount of work that we need to do with our eyes in that close up proximity, and the computer can be really flat. This is why some people like to read things on paper. Rather than on the computer, it's at a different angle. It's different lighting and there's different depth and kind of texture to it.

I've even had clients that a white piece of paper is too jarring to their eyes, so we found them light gray paper, and they were able to read, comprehend, and process information better on light gray paper than white paper. And that might sound crazy, but you're not listening. Our eyes are taking in information and our brain has to process that information, so if something's jarring to your eyes, it's going to be harder for your brain to process that, right?

I use head mounted lasers in my practice all the time with my clients, with neuro conditions, with athletes, with myself, post-concussion, and I stand by the fact that I refuse to use a red laser. I did for years. When I switched to a green light, I saw a big shift. Now I have no research to support this, except that colors elicit a different response to people.

Okay. I noticed, and I asked every single client of mine, which do you prefer? They all prefer the green. So if you're interested, interested in the head-mounted laser I use, let me know. I'll send you a link. It's made by a company motion guidance. I get no kickbacks from them. I only recommend this product because I use it every day.

I've been sent a lot of other head-mounted lasers. Why? I like this one. It is very adjustable and it's green. Okay, so color matters. Distance matters, work matters. Now let's talk about scrolling on your phone. Think like, what's that thing at the casino? So if you're watching me on YouTube, I'm weirdly pulling my arm up and down, which I actually look like a truck driver.

So if you're listening to me, it's like. Oh, slot machines. Sorry. Couldn't think of the word. You know how the slot machine, it kind of goes by fast and then catches Every time we scroll through our phone on social media, our eyes are kind of doing that slot machine and catching. But how freaking awesome at our, our eyes, because when we are scrolling like that, the picture isn't blurry, it's pretty clear.

But I think we can all admit after a little bit of scrolling, don't you feel a little disoriented? Yeah, it's 'cause your eyes are like, yo dude, quit it. And there, there some people, and I see this in myself, I see this with clients, that their eyes actually work best in that AKA jumping movement. They can't smoothly track, they can't gaze stabilize.

So based off my clients' days, like what they do during the day, what is making them feel crappy? I always create a visual reset for them. I've shared it in other episodes, but I'm not going to assume you've listened to all my episodes. So let's do a scrolling reset right now. So if you're driving, maybe just listen, but pin this for later.

So think about it, if our eyes are moving up and down really fast, that's okay. So you can do two things. Number one is if our eyes wanna move fast, let's move our head fast as well. So I want everybody right now to look up casually and don't stress your neck. And find a visual target. Remember it. Now look down.

Please note, I would like you to move just your head, not the rest of your body, and pick a visual target there. So now you've got two clear visual targets. Okay? So after you're scrolling, you say to your brain, okay, that was eyes fast head still. Now we're gonna do them both together. So everybody's gonna tilt their head and eyes up to visual target one down to two.

Up to one, down to two. Go as fast as you can, seeing that target clearly come back to center. Let your eyes adjust. Okay? I know if that made you dizzy, that's for another conversation, but it is very possible that that made you dizzy. What we just did, what was was, is called a VOR cancellation. So vestibular ocular reflex cancellation.

So I just showed your brain. Okay. Now let's do eyes fast and head together. And what you might have noticed is your head cannot move as fast as your eyes can, or maybe your head moves faster than your eyes. Okay, so that's option one. Then from there, you are going to keep your eyes straight on a target right in front of you, and I want you to move your head up and down as slow as humanly possible.

So now I'm showing my brain that we can keep our eyes fixed on a target and move our head at a glacial pace.

Okay. See how that one makes you feel. Or you can do option three, which is go back to your target one and target two, and jump to them as slowly as you can. Target one, target two. And what we're doing is just rematching our visual vestibular proprioceptive systems. I also have a special visual reset that I use, which is a proprioceptive one, and I think I shared that in episode, oh, it was one of the early episodes, maybe like five on eyes.

And what I'm gonna make you do is go watch that episode or. The link, the show notes, I will make sure, um, Joe links to that episode. And if you can't find it, I will send you a video on it. So maybe I can, you know, entice you to interact with me on social media. So maybe, and if not, no drama. So try those to show your brain what else is.

Okay. Sorry, my beagle got a scent if you heard him. He was encouraging me to also do the eye exercises. Something interesting about my beagle is he was a champion hunter. We rescued him from hunters who were gonna get rid of him because he was a terrible hunter. And when I realized, actually my best friend Cheryl realized, Cheryl.

The first thing she said when she met Willie was like, what's with his weird eye? And I was like, what do you mean my baby's perfect? And I looked and she's like, dude's got a lazy eye. And I looked at him and I was like, oh my God. He does. So what I've realized is Willie has some visual tracking issues.

This dude who comes from a champion bloodline of, uh, hunting dogs the other day. Walked right out to our mailbox to do his front potties, we call it. He walked right past the bunny, like literally right past the bunny. Didn't see it because the bunny was still, and I kind of freaked out. He peed. He walked right back in.

Now another, this happened again. Willie went running after a bunny because when I opened the door, the bunny was moving. So he saw it, but because he's such a good boy, I said, Willie stay. And he did so, so interesting of this dog has similar issues to most humans, some visual tracking issues. So let me get back to question one.

You know, I love a tangent, but I do my best to get back. Sometimes I get lost. Today I am going back. So when was the last time we closed our eyes? Here's something I'm gonna give you some insight. When you close your eyes, it is telling me your brain has enough information to turn off one of our big sensory inputs, our eyes.

So if you're exercising and you're closing your eyes, two things could be happening either. Number one, your visual system is a disruptor. It's confusing your brain, so by shutting your eyes, it allows your brain to focus more on the proprioceptive information or vestibular, which would be if your head is moving in space or your body and head is moving in space, like on a Pilates reformer, if you're doing like a squat or a lunge or option two.

You are removing the visual so you can integrate the vestibular and proprioceptive. So this might be a more advanced thought is with my clients, when they close their eyes, I then tune them into what they're feeling and how their body and head is moving so we can kind of recalibrate things. So the times when you close your eyes are telling me you either have enough sensory information to feel safe or.

Maybe the other two systems are stronger, meaning your vestibular, which is your inner ear. That's where your head is in space or proprioception, which is information from your skin, your muscles, your joints, um, your clothes, and then we should monopolize on that. So when was the last time you closed your eyes?

Take note of it and see if you can create more opportunities throughout your day to stop relying on your visual system. And if it's option one and you think your eyes are a disruptor, I want you to get excited. Reach out to a practitioner. I can help you find a neuro studio trained one that can help you use your proprioception and vestibular system to retrain your eyes so they can track better and move better, and don't disrupt your overall life or win-win.

So that leads me to question two. What changes when you close your eyes, and more specifically, what changes when you close one eye and move around? Are you bumping into things more or less? So everybody's got homework. Okay? Do this in your house. I just want you to maybe walk a normal route in your house.

I want you to close your left eye and do it. And close your right eye and do it, and I want you to notice which one, do you bump into things more or it maybe you're not bumping into anything. Maybe you have a great spatial awareness. Wah, wah, wah. Unlike me, or, which one can you get closer to items without touching it?

Okay, so like people who have great spatial awareness are dancers, uh, soccer players, football players, basketball players, but basketball players who are like good at boxing out and don't get fouls. So when you have to play a team sport, you have to be good at spatial awareness. You need to know where you are in relation to your teammates.

You dance like, yo, it looks real bad if you're like off your mark. So you've gotta know where you are in space. Okay. People who played like sports, like tennis or like softball, you know, well, it's kind of different when you're out in the field versus running the bases, but kind of solo sports, maybe running those people tend not to be as good at spatial awareness in certain, in uh, situations.

'cause they're not used to being around others in tight spaces. Right. Something interesting is people assume their more dominant eye is their better eye. And this is why I don't assume anything. I was actually teaching this. I was working with a client who was a cerebellar stroke and has really bad double vision.

So this is really important. So double vision is your brain can't process the two different pictures. It's getting two distinctly different pictures and your brain's like, I don't know which is right. I'll give you both of 'em. You figure it out. Oy, that's really jarring. So she told me, well, this is my better eye.

And I'm like, okay. So I, whichever was her better eye. So the eye that's closed, we're talking about the eye that's open. She said it was her better eye. So we did a movement with that eye and I even recorded her, then I had her close the other eye and do the same movement with that eye. And to her shock.

And I have backup here because I had one of my mentees observing. So no bullshit. I swear she said to me, um. Yeah. Um, I go say it. I know what you wanna say. And she's like, um, it felt better with my bad eye. Is that possible? And I said, let's look at the video. And we watched it together because it's so easy for me to say yes to her.

But she's got to sense and have the awareness. So I had her watch and I'm like, what do you think now watching it. So you felt it in your body, now you're gonna use your eyes and watch it. And she's like, yeah, holy crap. And I'm like, okay, let's not make any big generalizations. We don't know anything yet.

But I said, if we want your proprioception, your motor output is better when your brain is getting information to this eye. So why are we calling it your bad eye? Maybe it's just not dominant. And so your brain is prioritizing your dominant eye. However, that eye is not giving good intel. And the best part of the story was, and I said, well, like watch me.

So like my dominant eye is my better eye, so I'm opposite. So I am left eye dominant. And how do you know which eye dominant you are? Okay, so just everybody put out a thumb and like you're looking at something. So I see my computer and I got a thumb out. So I see my thumb in relation to my computer. With both eyes open, I'm gonna close my right eye and then I'm gonna close my left eye.

Right left. Do you remember Wayne's World, that movie when he is like camera one, camera two. Camera one. He was just closing his eyes. When you close one of your eyes, the picture is gonna jump. So when I close my right eye, my thumb stays in the exact same place. When I close my right eye, my thumb jump. My thumb jumps about two inches to the left in relation to my computer.

So I'm using it in relation that would indicate I am left eye dominant. Okay, so when I'm here. When I'm using both eyes, my brain is prioritizing my left eye because again, when I close my right eye, the picture doesn't move. So I stood right next to her and I'm like, see, so when I close my right eye, I have better spatial awareness.

And I swear to God guys, I bumped right into her and I was like, okay, hold on. Just for shits and giggles, I came back around and stood at the same place and I closed my left eye, my dominant eye, and I walked past her and cleared her without touching her. And I said, holy shit. I think my left eye, my dominant eyes, crap as well.

And we had a good laugh. Now, please note, I am not making a rule. I don't just pull shit outta my ass and make it fact, 'cause I've seen it. I have tested. Many people, and when I say many, like thousands of people, and honestly I can't make a generalization. So what I do is I test it. Okay, I know the science, but I don't know this person's brain life experience and whatever's going on, so I don't assume I test.

So now you know how to test which eye is your dominant eye, and now you've got homework to see which eye is actually accurate. So let me explain. When I close my right eye, my brain thinks this is gospel. But what I realized is everything is slightly skewed to the right. So when I tried to move around my client, I bumped into her.

When I closed my left eye and opened my right eye, I walked past her without touching her, which would tell me that that is actually accurate to where she is in space. My left eye is eye lying to me. Okay, so if you have terrible spatial awareness, think about it. Maybe just walk around with an eye patch.

You know, I solved your problems, and don't worry, there is ways to integrate it back in. But that is not for this podcast. This podcast is about asking you questions. All right? So think about it. What happens? Maybe you close one eye, both eyes, and you're still good as gold. Great work. Your eyes are not only giving good intel.

But your brain is able to process it. So I want you to maximize that. I want you to challenge that. Okay. So in your sessions, I'm gonna ask you to move based off this an inch or two inches and keep in line with the laser pointer. I do this with every professional athlete I've worked with. I do this a lot, especially when they're on the field.

I find out where they miss tackles or miss the soccer ball, and based off that, I'll know that's a weakness in their visual fields and we'll maximize it. If your visual field is fricking amazing. Let's maximize it. Right. Okay. And last but not least, I wanna keep this episode short and sweet just like me.

Sorry, not accurate. I am short. I'm not very sweet. Sassy maybe. But anyway, could your eyes be limiting your strength? Remember I talked earlier about the eyes po potentially being a disruptor, dude. It's a real deal, so you might be using your dominant eye. You might be missing catches on the football field.

You might be in tennis, missing volleys. Okay? I sometimes whiff overheads in tennis, not because of my form, it's my visual fields. I miss it like totally with and miss the ball completely, right? When I do that, I take a step to the back line. Okay. I open up my visual field, which is I pin my head to my body, improve my vertical tracking up and down, and I do convergence, which is just putting a thumb out and bringing it closer to your nose at different angles.

Okay. Then I take my overhead again. If I don't with it and I hit it beautifully like I normally do, I do nothing else. If I whiff it again, then I know. Hold on, Meg. Today is not the day, not while you're on the court. I know I have to go back and do some homework and I will eye patch myself again and teach.

Make sure that my brain is prioritizing what's coming in from my right eye. Okay. Or left eye, depending on the day. Okay, so that was a little technical. Shake that off if you don't know it. Let's keep this shit super simple. Homework number three. So I know I'm giving questions and homework, but these are questions in the form of movement.

So I want everybody right now to get down on the ground and do a pushup. I'll wait. I don't care if you do it on your knees and feet. Just do a pushup. Shut up. Don't think about forms. Just do it. Okay? Now shake that off. I want you to put something, a visual target, right between your hands. Okay? A pen, something.

Now get back in your pushup position. All I want you to do right now is get as close to that visual target as you can and as far away as you can, doing a pushup. Focus on your eyes, not your form, not your abs, not anything. Just get close and far away. I want you to tell me did your pushup get worse or better when I forced you to use your visual system?

Okay. Okay. If your pushup got better, beautiful, that means your eyes are not disrupting, but you need to tune into your visual information so that you can get stronger. It's not a strength issue. Your not tapping into your eyes is limiting your progress. Whereas if your pushup got worse with the visual target.

Well, then you need to work on your visual system and your integration with your vestibular and proprioception. Let me be more specific. You need to find a movement professional who knows how to do this. Okay? You can go on my social media find tips, but what's happening here is your eyes are not able to converge and anytime you're doing any movement.

A lunge, a press, a pull, or anything where you've gotta move closer or further away from a visual target that's gonna be limiting your strength, and that is a huge problem. I'll never forget, I did this drill with my niece's girl scout troop. This one girl said, I can't do pushups. I'm too weak. And just by teaching her convergence, which I said it before, but we'll do it again, is putting, I had her hold a pen or something and bring it towards her nose and away three times.

Okay, these are called pencil pushups. I taught her eyes how to converge, and then I said, now get down on the ground. Look at that pen. Get closer and further away. This girl was able to do a pushup on her feet, not on her knees, and all her other friends clapped. They were so proud of her. So here's this young girl thinking she's weak, not cool enough, not strong enough as the other girls who were doing pushups, and it wasn't.

It was just we had to tap into our visual system. So to review, I threw a lot of visual stuff at you today. Number one, I want you to think about when you are comfortable to close your eyes. That's going to give us intel where your brain has enough sensory information to feel safe. These might be great positions to do your eye exercises because we know your proprioception is good there, and we know your vestibular system feels safe.

Why? Because you were able to close your eyes. So open your eyes and do visual exercises in those specific positions. Also, maybe find more time to close your eyes and give your eyes a damn break. Okay. They do a lot, right? Question two, what happened when you closed one of your eyes? What happened to the picture you were seeing?

Was it better? Was it worse? And how did that affect your spatial awareness? Keep in mind that information could change everything and would dictate how we would start integrating visual system into your workouts. Don't assume it's your dominant eye. Don't assume it's your weaker eye. Try it. Comments on social media.

Send me a note. I can't wait to hear what your observations are. And last, but certainly not least, could your eyes be limiting your strength, your progress, your potential? We tested it in a pushup. Don't be discouraged, be encouraged because there are so many ways you can improve your visual field. The muscles of our eyes, ability to track to ga stabilize to get a better picture so your brain can process that sensory information and give you a badass motor output IE movement.

So do not limit your progress because you don't wanna do visual exercises. And if you need help, I am here and I can connect you to people who do so. Thank you so much for tuning in today to today's episode. I hope maybe you will incorporate more eye exercises, visual rest, or just ask more questions about your visual system.

Thanks guys, and I will see you next time. 

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