Bill Daniels explains how vestibular dysfunction, a subtle inner-ear balance issue, raises stress hormones and blocks fat loss. Fix it by focusing your eyes on a fixed point during squats and cable rotations to engage your vestibular system, which improves digestion, breathing, and balance.
Hi, I'm Bill from Beyond Fitness Online, and today I want to talk about a question that I've gotten a couple times over the last couple weeks, and that is, how is it that training the vestibular system relates to losing weight? Now, that's a great question, so let's break it down. When we're talking about losing weight, there's 2 major factors. Factor number one, as everybody knows, is Caloric intake. So how many calories in versus how many calories out determines weight loss. That's only part of the story because you could sit there and eat a bunch of garbage that really has no nutritional value and lose weight. But the problem is the weight you're losing. When we say we want to lose weight, we generally want to lose fat. So the other piece of this is your hormonal balance, and that comes from the nutrients in your food and also comes from nutrient timing. So those are 2 really important things. Now, the other piece that really plays, plays a role in your hormones is the amount of stress you're under. So you can get nutritional stress if you're eating a bunch of stuff that's not healthy for you. But there are other forms of stress. We all know about emotional stress. If you're having trouble in a relationship or you've got deadlines at work, you're stuck in traffic, all those things can elevate your stress levels. But the secret is that there are underlying low-level stressors that are constantly going And if we're not addressing those, that's gonna cause a problem. And one of those things that I most often see with people is they have low levels of vestibular issues. You may not have vertigo. If you do, it's very obvious you have a vestibular issue. But if you have low-level vestibular issues where you're not sure why your balance isn't great, you're not sure why your feet cramp, why you sometimes get a little lightheaded, it impacts your blood pressure, it impacts your digestion, all of these things can play a role in your stress levels, which then ultimately make it difficult to lose weight. So here's what we want to do. We want to really pay attention to the fact that the vestibular system needs stimulation, and that can be done in a lot of different ways. But some of the best ways when you're incorporating it into your regular exercise is to give yourself a visual target while you do any exercise. Because the vestibular system ultimately tells our brain which way our head is moving, whether it's this way or this way or this way, and also which way our body's moving, whether that's forward and backwards, side to side, up and down, or any combination of those. So if you are doing an exercise like a cable rotation, you might keep your eyes on one spot. You might have your eyes follow your movement. Same thing with a squat. Now the saccule is the part of our vestibular system that tells us we're going up and down. And if you're keeping your eyes on one spot and squatting up and down while you do that, that's really gonna stimulate that saccule. So doing things like that is the quickest and easiest way to stimulate the vestibular system. It really increases the amount of drive that you actually get neurologically. It will lower the amount of stress you're experiencing day to day. And your movement will get better, your balance will get better, things like pelvic floor problems, digestive problems, breathing problems might start to lessen or go away, and you're ultimately gonna start to feel a whole lot better. So give that a try, leave a comment below, let me know how that went for you, 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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