Bill from Beyond Fitness Online explains how the medial vestibular nucleus controls neck flexion and midline tone. Dysfunction can cause neck stiffness, poor head control, blurred vision, or dizziness. He walks through a self-assessment and a VORC drill using a thumb target to improve neck mobility and visual clarity during movement.
Hi, I'm Bill from Beyond Fitness Online. If you watched last week's video, you saw that we talked about what's something called the superior vestibular nucleus. If you haven't watched it, it's right here. It's all about how your vestibular system communicates to your brain. There's 4 different ways. Today I'm going to show you the second way. This one is the medial vestibular nucleus. Now this one goes into the medulla, which is the lower part of the brainstem. And that is big for flexion movements. If you bend over and try to touch your toes, for example, that's flexion. If you're trying to do an arm curl or bend your elbow, that's flexion. Now, primarily what this does is this sets midline tone in the neck and upper back. So the flexion we really want to test is, can you tuck your chin down to your chest? Does that give you neck stiffness? Does that give you neck tightness, upper back stiffness? Is that a problem for you? If it is, then this might be an issue that you need to work on. So what I recommend to test yourself on this is to see how far can you rotate your head left and right? Can you flex your head down? Can you tilt your head left and right? Get an idea of what those feel like for you, what your range of motion is, and then use that as your baseline. You may also notice that you have poor control of your head. Your head bounces a lot when you walk. You may be unable to move your eyes from one target to the other without getting a lot of blur or, or getting dizzy. These are all indications that you have a problem with this pathway, and what we want to do is start to work on fixing that. So you've got your tests, you've tested yourself. Now here's the drill. We're going to do an exercise called a VORC, and I'm going to show you that exercise right here. Begin with a target in your hand. In this case, I'm using my thumb. You're going to move that target horizontally and keep your eyes centered in the eye sockets and follow it with your head. From there, you can try doing it vertically, going up and down, again only moving through the neck. And then finally, you can go at the angles in between. Now, after you've done your VORC, it can be a little bit tricky to get the hang of, but once you've done that, all of those neck movements should improve. You should have— feel at least looser, if you're not even moving further away in each direction as you rotate your neck. You should feel like if you're doing these saccades that your vision stays more clear, and you should also find that all of your flexion movements get better. You should be able to reach closer to your toes if you couldn't touch them before. You should be able to do more, you know, more weight or more repetitions on your flexion movements if you're using resistance. So give this a try. Let me know in the comments below how this went for you. And if you haven't already, please subscribe. I post new updates every Friday. And until next time, live healthy.
Stop Stretching Your Neck. Try This Instead (It Might Improve Your Vision Too)
