Bill from Beyond Fitness Online explains how the vestibular system controls spinal extension and shows a simple test using a Snellen chart: tilt your head and watch for blurring. Two corrective exercises, the head-tilt walk and infinity walk, retrain vestibular function and improve posture.
Hi, I'm Bill from Beyond Fitness Online. Today I want to talk to you about the 3rd pathway from the vestibular system to the brain and how that impacts your movement, how to test to see if that's a problem for you, and what to do to improve it. So today we're going to talk about the lateral vestibulonucleus. The lateral vestibulonucleus goes into the pons Which is similar to the superior nucleus, and that helps to facilitate extension. Now, primarily that communication comes from what's called the utricle, which is the part of the vestibular system that tells your brain which way your body is moving in space on a lateral plane, so side to side or forward and backward. What you may find if this is an issue for you is that you have really poor spinal posture. You may have a kyphotic back where you're a little rounded, a little hunchback. You may have a difficult time stabilizing your spine. So if you're trying to do any anti-rotation drills or any kind of stabilization where the spine is required, you may have a difficult time doing that or feel really weak there. You may also see problems whenever you try to go into extension that may be really stiff or really weak. You may look down at your feet and notice that one of your feet is internally rotated a little bit more than the other. You may find that you have constant back pain or problems with your spine. You may have problems getting deep into a squat because of the stiffness. So these are all indications that you may have a problem with your lateral nucleus. So here is the test. You're going to want to take a letter. If you have it, you'll want to use a Snellen chart. And a Snellen chart is what you see at the eye doctor with all the letters. You're going to want to get a little bit back and you're going to want to see what line you can read comfortably, the smallest line you can read comfortably. And you're going to want to tilt your head while looking at one specific letter and stay there for about 10 seconds. If that letter starts to get blurry, then this might be your problem and we need to fix this. So in order to fix this exercise, we are going to do an exercise called a head tilt walk, and we are going to do this in 2 different ways. And I'm going to show you that right here.
In this first exercise, we're going to tilt our head towards the side of the vestibular issue. We're gonna have a visual target directly in front of us, and we're gonna walk directly towards it and back, keeping your eyes on that target the entire time. In the second version of this, we're gonna do an infinity walk with that head tilt. This is tilting that head to the same side and walking around cones in an infinity pattern. This will allow you to get more extension through the spine as you keep your eyes on the target.
I hope you found that interesting. This has been a big problem solver for a lot of my clients and really helped to straighten out some vestibular issues and vertigo that they've had. Give it a try. Leave me a message in the comments below. And 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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