Bill from Beyond Fitness Online shows how your vestibular system controls balance and posture. He uses a weighted bag on your shoulders during squats and lunges to sharpen your body awareness, then removes it to move more fluidly. The technique works for stationary and walking lunges.
Hi, I'm Bill from Beyond Fitness Online. Today I want to show you a little trick that I use with some of my clients in order to help them have better posture and then ultimately move better through their exercises. Now this does ultimately come back to the vestibular system, which is something I talk about a lot. Your vestibular system's job is to tell your brain which way gravity is pulling you. Now if your, if your vestibular system is not sending a strong enough signal from both sides, Then you're going to end up having balance issues, posture issues, strength issues, and the list goes on and on. So what we want to do is start to upregulate those signals a little bit. So I'm going to show you how to use— what I'm going to use is a bag of rice. You could also use a beanbag or anything with a little bit of weight that's soft, because we're going to put that weight on your head or your shoulders. What that's going to do is give your vestibular system more signal to which way gravity's pulling you because now it's got more weight pulling you in that direction. So let me show you how that works right here. To start, put a bag of rice on one shoulder or 2 bags of rice, one on each shoulder. These bags weigh about 5 pounds each. Try doing exercises like squats and lunges to explore how that feels for your balance. Take it to the next level by putting one bag on top of your head. This helps you keep your head in alignment while you do these movements. Try this with movements like squats and lunges. With your lunges, you can do them stationary like you see here, or do a walking lunge, or you can do a regular walk down the hallway. I hope you found that interesting. This can be a really powerful tool to really start to move better. I will use it for myself or with some clients to help them get an orientation of where they are before they start doing traditional exercises like squats or lunges. And from there, we take the extra weight away, the bag of rice or whatever we're using, and all of a sudden they start to feel themselves moving more fluidly because they finally understand where they actually are in space. It seems kind of weird, and I would recommend you give it a try and see how it works out for you. And let me know in the comments below how that went. And if you want more information like this, check out my website at beyondfitnessonline.com and subscribe to my channel right right here, one of these up or down. And I post new updates every Friday. And until next time, live healthy.
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