Bill from Beyond Fitness Online shows how eye-movement exercises stimulate your brainstem to activate deep core muscles that stabilize your spine. Start with saccades: move your eyes between two targets for 10 reps, then work up to a minute. Once comfortable, add the eye movements to squats and overhead presses.
Hi, I'm Bill from Beyond Fitness Online, and today I want to talk to you about how to improve your core strength when you have back pain. Now, back pain is really common. You can have back pain in the lower back, which is the most common. You can also get back pain up your spine into the mid-back, upper back, and even into the neck, and I usually group that into Uh, back pain when I'm talking to people. Now, what back pain generally comes down to is not having enough stability. Now, there are a lot of different things that can be causing back pain, but what I most commonly see is that the tiny little muscles that are supposed to help hold your spine into good posture just aren't working right. And in order to upregulate those, it's more than just trying to move them because oftentimes now movement Hurts. So what we need to do is take a different approach. Now you have different systems in your body that actually help to upregulate those muscles, and a lot of those systems come into connection with your eyes. So there's different eye exercises that can help with this. So this seems a little bit weird, but I'm going to show you this here. Now here's what we do. This exercise is called a saccade. Now what you're going to do is you're going to have 2 targets in front of you. So I'll have one right here. And one right here. And I'm just going to go look at one, look at the other, look at the other, look at the other. And you just go back and forth between those 2. Now what this does is when you're doing it horizontally is it starts to upregulate a part of your brain in the brainstem that directly helps to upregulate your vestibular system, which also in turn will help to set the stability within your spine. So that sounds a little bit weird, but what we want to do is first get used to doing that. Try doing about 10 repetitions of this right here in front of you, and you're not just doing it as fast as you can, but you want to make sure that you're actually getting a clear picture of what you're looking at on target 1 before you go to target 2. After you feel like you've done that for 10 reps and you feel okay, then you're going to want to try it for about a minute. You want to try and pick up your speed but not losing the focus on the target. If you still feel okay doing that, as odd as this sounds, you can start doing this with different exercises, particularly with exercises where you're standing. So things like squats, things like standing up and doing an overhead press, or any, any exercise at all where you're standing and moving your arms or your legs. Now, when you, when you transition into using this with an exercise, start off with very slow eye movements And make sure that you're safe. You don't want to do this and lose your balance. And that's really why I have you just doing the eye exercise first. But give it a try, and what you should notice is you start to get more reflexive stability within the spine, and it should help to eliminate some of your back pain. If you start to get dizzy or having negative effects of this, then this is not the right exercise for you at this time, but it might be something to come back to in the future. If you need more information, check out my website at beyondfitnessonline.com. Or comment below and I will respond to you. And while you're there at my website, check out the vestibular quiz and I can give you more information on where to start with your vestibular training exercises. Until next time, live healthy.
Stop Stretching Your Neck. Try This Instead (It Might Improve Your Vision Too)
