Bill Daniels shows three ways to stimulate your vagus nerve without equipment: pinch your nose and try to inhale for five seconds, shrug your shoulders, and hum deeply from your belly. Stack them together: resist the inhale while shrugging, then exhale and hum.
Hi, I'm Bill from Beyond Fitness Online, and today I want to talk to you about how to stimulate your vagus nerve in a more effective way. So there are a lot of different ways to stimulate the vagus nerve, and if you want more information about that, you can check out this video right here. So let's get a little bit more specific because I've had a lot of people asking, well, what exercises can I do? There's a lot of different things you can do, but I'm going to give you a couple of examples right here. First thing is the vagus nerve plays a big role in breathing, and in particular, if you really want to activate the vagus nerve, we want to start to activate the medulla where the vagus nerve goes at the bottom of the brainstem. So what we want to do is you're going to close your mouth, you're going to pinch your nose, and you're going to want to try to inhale. Now obviously you're not going to be able to take any air in, but I want you to feel Feel the muscles contract to inhale. So that's going to be the diaphragm. You're going to feel muscles in the pectoralis or the chest muscles. You're going to feel some muscles in the neck, and and those should be active. And we're going to do this for about five seconds. So it's going to look like this. Okay. Now you should feel those muscles activate as you're trying to inhale. That's number one. Number two. The vagus nerve actually shares a sheath with your accessory nerve, and that's cranial nerve 11, and then cranial nerve 11 is responsible for shoulder shrugs. So we can shrug the shoulders up, and sometimes that can be enough to help facilitate the vagus nerve and get it going a little bit better. Thirdly, one of the most common things we see for stimulating the vagus nerve is humming. Now humming is because it sends a vibration down through the midline of the body, which is where the vagus nerve goes. So we just do a nice deep hum, trying to hum from the belly. And again, you do that for an extended period of time and that can stimulate the vagus nerve. Now here's the key. Everybody needs a different amount of stimulation and sometimes you can start to stack multiple stimulus together to get a better result. So in this case, what we can do is we can take a resisted inhale with our shoulder shrugs, and then when we— after the 6 seconds, we take our hand off our mouth and we go into an exhale and we hum with that exhale. So it'll look like this: shrugged up, inhale, hmm for the exhale. Give that a try. Let me know how that works for you. Let me know if you feel like that helped with your vagus stimulation. 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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