Finding Balance

We all want to achieve or maintain better balance — the goal being not to fall. But balance is much more than that. Balance also tells you where you are in space and orients you to your surroundings. Balance helps you plan and control movements to get you where you want to go smoothly, efficiently, and safely. Balance tells you how fast you’re moving and coordinates the timing of when you will arrive at your destination. And yes, balance keeps you upright. 

Many of you may have seen other clients staring at pencils and moving their heads around and might be wondering what the heck they are doing.

I am so proud that one of the most important traits of instructors at The Bodysmith is our constant drive to learn new information and incorporate material that will benefit our clients.  Over the past few years, many of us have been studying neurosomatics and incorporating more brain-based exercises to help improve our clients’ eyes, inner ear, and movement — in other words, balance. 

Traditional balance exercises might have you standing on something wobbly or precarious. However, as we learn more about the brain, the exercises are changing. Balance doesn’t live in your muscles or joints. Balance lives in your brain and your nervous system. 

Your brain depends on good signals coming in to be able to process and integrate these signals that spit out the desired result — good balance. These signals come from your eyes or visual system, the inner ear or vestibular system, and the movement or proprioceptive system. If there are deficits in any of these systems and the signals they send to the brain, the output will result in your body suffering physically. This could include being slower, weaker, tense, anxious, frustrated, in pain, fatigued, and always carrying reflexive muscle tension. 

Our bodies have a neural hierarchy and movement of the body is actually not at the top. Most important to this hierarchy is our vision, next our vestibular or inner ear, and last our proprioceptive or movement system. When this hierarchy is out of whack, it leads to a sensory mismatch which can cause unwanted symptoms, the most common being motion sickness. 

So what does that have to do with looking at that pencil and moving our head around? 
Our eyes have six muscles that move them in different directions. A lack of exercise in our eyes can lead to weak and stiff muscles, just like when we don’t move our bodies. This ultimately leads to weakness in your posture and movements. To challenge and work these muscles, we have to move our head with the eyes still, move our eyes with the head still, and move our head and eyes in opposite directions. 

Next up is our inner ear or vestibular system, which is essential to everything we do. It has three primary parts, the semicircular canals, otolith organs, and vestibulocochlear nerve. The semicircular canals are extremely important in training our balance. They sense head motion, velocity of movement, and enable gaze stabilization, or the ability for the eyes to stay still while the head moves. For good semicircular canal input, we need to exercise it by moving our head side to side, up and down, and up and down when rotated, or on a diagonal line to both the right and left.

The visual and vestibular are intimately connected. This is why you see us working the eyes and moving the head in a balance position that is challenging for us. That balance position might be different for each person, from day to day and from drill to drill. It might be with feet together, one in front of the other, standing on one foot, or even sitting or lying down. For example, it might seem strange to work on balance while sitting or lying down, but sometimes our signals are weak enough to cause the exercise or drill to be threatening to the brain, thus resulting in unwanted symptoms such as nausea or headache. By picking a position that is safe for the brain, we can work up to a more challenging position and strengthen these systems.

And what’s happening when we walk up and down the hallway moving our heads? 
We are challenging our visual and vestibular system, then integrating the skill in our most common movement activity — gait. After the head and eye drills, we then integrate the exercises into our bodies. This might be by walking while moving our head with our eyes on a target or walking while moving our head and our eyes simultaneously, or by swaying in an upright plank position in different directions while moving our head. 

So that’s what is happening when you see clients waving around and gazing at the pencil in front of them. It might look kind of wacky, but not only have I seen significant improvements in my client’s gait and balance, but I have also noticed huge changes in my own body. I have had a lifelong issue of spinal alignment problems, including my ribcage and jaw, a leg that turns out when I walk, and car sicknesses. The first time I tried this set of drills, I noticed my spinal alignment, leg, and gait were greatly improved. Over a few months, not only had my gait and balance improved, my cross bite was almost gone, and my car sickness was improved. After over a year of practicing the drills, my motion sickness is gone, I can now read in a moving car, and my crossbite is gone. Working your visual and vestibular system improves much more than balance. 

Interested in better balance? Give us a call and let us know you want to start balance training.