How The Vagus Nerve Impacts Your Balance And Movement

Hi, I'm Bill from Beyond Fitness Online, and today I'm going to talk to you about the vagus nerve and why that's important for your exercise and your health. Now, the vagus nerve is the longest nerve in your body. You've got 2 of them. You've got a left side one and a right side one, and they go from the brainstem in the medulla and basically all the way down the midline of your body, impacting your organs and your breathing muscles And all kinds of other things. So it's an important nerve to really pay attention to, and it's easy to stimulate while you're doing other exercises. Now, we talked about how it enters in the medulla, and the medulla, when stimulated, helps with flexion muscles and flexion movements, and then it also helps with rhythm. So if you're trying to do any exercise that requires flexion, Adding rhythm to it, adding vagus nerve stimulation to it can also be very, very helpful. Now the vagus nerve also impacts what's called the insular cortex, and that's right up here on the— kind of buried into the little fold of the brain up here. And the insula really impacts our sense of self. So if you ever feel like you're having an out-of-body experience, your insula is not working right. It also anticipates what's happening or what's coming in terms of what kind of sympathetic response you're going to need. So for example, if you're going to run up a hill, your brain sees this and says, okay, blood pressure is going to need to be here, heart rate's going to need to go up to here, and those kinds of things change in anticipation for running up that hill. So it's important that we get the insular cortex working correctly because that plays a big role in the psychology of our exercise and our movement in our day-to-day life. So if we want to upregulate the vagus nerve, here's a couple of things you can do. We start at the bottom. We've got the pelvic floor. You can do contraction and relaxation of the pelvic floor muscles. This works well for men and women. So just because you're male doesn't mean that this won't be beneficial for you. As a matter of fact, I tend to see better results doing pelvic floor work with men than I do with women, mostly because they've just never done it before. Other things that stimulate the vagus nerve will be humming or talking, making noise, because that vibration starts to stimulate all of those nerves right in there and upregulates everything. So making noise, grunting while you exercise, isn't necessarily a bad thing. It might actually be helpful for you. We also may need to do some work with the tongue, pressing the tongue into the roof of the mouth, moving the tongue around the teeth. Things like that may actually be a great way to warm up that area so that you get more of an upregulation of the vagus nerve. We mentioned earlier any kind of flexion movements. So if you want to add flexion, particularly in the neck, we add pressure here like you're trying to flex the neck. That may also play a big role. And one of the biggest things I go to with almost everybody I work with is breathing. We start working on different breathing mechanics. Specifically rhythmic breathing, and that really helps to upregulate the vagus nerve. So if any of these things are difficult for you, you have digestive issues, you have problems with your breathing, you have weak flexor muscles, or you're just overly extended in general with your posture, these are all indications that you need to work on your vagus nerve. I've also written a blog on that. You can check that on my website. And that's in the description. And if you haven't already, please subscribe to my channel. I post new updates every Friday. And until next time, live healthy.