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Bates said avoid the minus lens (if possible).
Now, science shows why.
The entire eye S L O W L Y "accommodates" to that
wretched minus lens.
Also, if you are going to work on vision-clearing,
I would suggest reading a Snellen eye-chart, just
to confirm your progress.
One reason I like to recommend that people read at least 1 full book on the Bates method is that it provides a more complete understanding of it than the otherwise confusing snippets people can offer here.
As for crossing your eyes, that's something you can easily try for 1/2 hour and see how you vision does afterwards or the next day (sometimes it's delayed). My guess is it won't do any good, but some people do use stereograms or "magic eye" pictures that improve their vision a bit. Those are a different context entirely than simply crossing your eyes without meaning, and I'm not totally sure why they would help at all, but it seems to me to be something to do with shaking up convergence and accommodation (the amount the eyes point in to look near and how much they adjust focus).
But my guess is that whoever recommended eye strengthening exercises is doing so out of ignorance and little or no experience improving his own vision.
Everyone wants to try to combine Bates with other methods, but what happens is they end up not getting anything out of Bates because it can be subtle enough to understand already without throwing conflicting things into the mix. Bates can be combined with certain types of other methods, but you shouldn't even be thinking about that yet. One thing at a time.
