Bill Daniels explains how your vestibular system controls balance and movement through your inner ear, brainstem, and cerebellum. Vestibular dysfunction causes dizziness, vertigo, and poor posture. He walks through specific rehab exercises: head and eye movements, position work, extension drills, and tongue exercises to retrain the system.
Hi, I'm Bill from Beyond Fitness Online, and today I want to answer a question that I get a lot. And if you've followed me for any length of time, you know that I'm big on training the vestibular system. Now, if you're not familiar with what the vestibular system is, is it's your balancing system in your inner ear, but it does a lot more than that. The question that I'm often getting is, why do you always want to talk about or train the vestibular system? And the reason is, is that it does a lot of different things in your body. It impacts your movement and your balance and your posture and all that. So real quick, just so you understand the anatomy, you have a vestibular apparatus in each ear buried way down in the bone, and they each have 5 parts on each side. You've got 3 semicircular canals, and you can imagine little donuts with fluid inside, and then there's a nerve that is influenced by that fluid, and that fluid moves whenever you turn your head. And those 3 canals are angled in different directions. When you turn your head this way, it turns the nerve this way and turns this nerve that way, and then that tells your brain, hey, your head's moving in a certain direction. Then the other 2 parts of the vestibular system are called your otolith organs, and they're more like— I would describe as nerves sticking up into a bowl of jelly with rocks on top. And as you move that bowl, the rocks with the inertia move the jelly, which impacts the nerve and then tells your brain which way your body is moving in space. So those send the signals to your brain so that your brain understands how you're moving in relation to gravity. However, with that said, it's not just that part that can go wrong. It sends that signal to the brain through the nerve, which is cranial nerve 8. And cranial nerve 8 will then send that signal to the brain. And if that's not working, you might be getting a false signal or your brain might not understand what's happening. Then that signal goes into the brainstem, which then has a whole host of issues potentially because your brainstem controls your posture, your movement, your coordination, a lot of things like that. It works closely with the cerebellum, which is the back part of your brain. And that's really involved in coordination, detecting errors, and so on. And then it also feeds into 4 nuclei, and those nuclei have jobs like coordinating your eye movement with your head movement. It coordinates your stability. It helps to tell your body what muscles need to be tense in order to keep good posture in relationship to gravity. There's a whole lot of other things that happen. It also is even involved in your breathing function. Believe it or not. So it does a lot of different things. So you can imagine that if you have a vestibular problem, it may not necessarily be vertigo. It might be you're having issues with breathing function, or you're not able to breathe mechanically the right way to get the most efficient oxygen use. You might have issues with your balance. You might have vertigo. You might have dizziness. You might have really poor posture, and that could be related to your vestibular system. So all of these things are signs, and there's, there's more things to it, but those are the things that I typically see with people that don't realize they have a vestibular issue. So the next question becomes, what do we do about it? And there's a lot of different routes to go, but if you're thinking about trying some of this stuff on your own to see if it makes a difference for you, you're going to want to train head movements. So that means moving your head in different directions with fixed vision Or with your vision going with whatever you're looking at. So as your head moves, can your eyes coordinate or do things get blurry and dizzy? Then try putting your head in different positions with exercise. You can try just doing eye movements and see if that helps you or if that makes things worse, if that makes you dizzy or lightheaded. You'll want to try different body movements and exercise, including and probably more efficiently And more commonly, you'll want to be doing extension exercises. So really opening up the body. You'll want to maybe try doing some things with cranial nerve 8. So that's not just vestibular stuff, but that also might be playing with some sound because sound can impact the nerve. If the issue is in the nerve, it might upregulate the nerve and fix whatever's going on there. The other cranial nerves that are involved, numbers 5, 6, 7, 9, and 10, And if you want to go into looking all those up, I have other videos on those. But those might impact what's happening with cranial nerve 8 because a lot— they interact in different ways within the brainstem. So that would be how we upregulate the brainstem. And in particularly cranial nerve 10, you might have heard of as the vagus nerve. And the vagus nerve plays a huge role in everything in the midline of the body. So you might want to work on pelvic floor stuff. So you may have heard of Kegels. Or just working on controlling your pelvic floor. You might want to do midline stability exercises, so some core work where you're forced to stabilize so you don't rock side to side. You may want to do some exercises with your tongue because the tongue then really helps build stability through the neck. So if that's where you're having a problem, then that might upregulate the vestibular system. And then my favorite thing to do with people is error correction drills, and I have a great example of that right here. But basically trying to do an exercise where you've got to correct an error, and that can upregulate that whole pathway that helps to improve the vestibular system. So there's a ton of stuff here. I generally start by getting an idea of what's actually happened with people, do an assessment, figure out what needs to be worked on, and I go from there. And there's so many different routes you can go, but I totally encourage you to try some of these things out. See what you think. See how they help you out. Comment below if you've gotten any positive impact or if you have any other questions. I would love to answer them. I would love to see your experience and see how it goes for you. If you haven't already, please subscribe to my channel. I post new updates every Friday. And until next time, live healthy.
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