The acute effect of strength exercises at different intensities on intraocular pressure

This study aimed to determine the effect of two basic strength exercises with progressive loads on intraocular pressure (IOP).

Seventeen (out of 20 recruited) physically active male military officers (46 ± 4.77 years) performed the jump squat and the ballistic bench press exercises, in counterbalanced order, with four and five progressive loads, respectively. IOP was measured with a rebound tonometer before and after each of the corresponding loads.

IOP linearly increases with heavier loads for the jump squat (r = 0.976) and the ballistic bench press (r = 0.991) exercises. A significant IOP elevation was observed during the jump squat test (p < 0.001), and Bonferroni-Holm correction revealed that ~75% of one repetition maximum (RM) was able to promote significant changes in IOP with respect to the other three loads (all corrected p values <0.05), whereas the load corresponding to ~65%RM and ~60%RM induced a significant IOP rise when compared with the load of ~50%RM (corrected p-values of 0.43 in both cases). For its part, IOP significantly increases with the bench press test (p < 0.001), and performing the ~50%RM load was enough to induce significant IOP changes (corrected p-value <0.01).

Acute performance of jump squat and ballistic bench press lead to a significant increase of IOP, and 5 min of rest are enough to recover baseline IOP values. There is a strong linear association between the increase in load and the IOP rise for both exercises, and bench press execution produces a significantly higher IOP increase when compared with the jump squat for the same relative loads.