Mastering Balance, Midline Stability, and Strength with Smooth Pursuits and Saccades

Hi, I'm Bill from Beyond Fitness Online. Today we're going to talk about how eye movements can impact your exercise and how you can use them to improve the way that you move and improve your balance. So we're going to talk about 2 specific kinds of eye movements. We're going to talk about saccades and we're going to talk about smooth pursuits. And we're going to talk about the difference of them and how they actually help you and when to use them. So first, let's talk about smooth pursuits. What a smooth pursuit is, is when your eyes are actually tracking something. So as my pen moves across, my eyes follow it. That's without my head moving. Now that is a kind of a lower level of what's called a VOR, which is when your head moves and your eyes stay on a target. So what we want to do is start to use smooth pursuits to enhance that eye movement, which then also impacts the vestibular system. Now, when the vestibular system is impacted, stability in the midline gets better, balance gets better, and then extension movements get better because it impacts a part of the brain called the cerebellum, which is all about control and coordination and balance. So smooth pursuits can be, as you can see here, in any direction— up and down, left and right, or diagonally. And it's just, you have to have a moving target to do it. If you don't have a pen, you can use your thumb, and that's a great way to do this. Now, You can also do saccades. Now the difference is saccades are, as I got here, is you're going to have one target and then you're going to flip your eyes to the other target. Now what happens is when you do that, it goes boom, boom, and you can go back and forth. And just like the smooth pursuits, you can go in any direction— up, down, left, right, or diagonal. Now the saccades will actually impact a lot more than just the way your eyes move. It's about getting focused It's about controlling your eye movements. And then there's actually even a really cool study where they took some elderly people with some balance issues. They measured their foot contact on the ground, just like you would at a drugstore nearby that's selling orthotics. You stand on the thing and it tells you how much of your foot is there. And then they try to sell you an orthotic based on that. And what they did was they had these people do some saccades horizontally, left and right. And they did that for a certain amount of time, found that there was a significant amount of contact with the ground in their feet after doing that. And that's because of the whole pathway that it stimulates, and it gets kind of complicated. We won't really get into that in this video. But by doing that, obviously, if more foot is in contact with the ground, then balance is going to be better. And that's going to give you a better stable base, which then will impact all movement, including arm movements. Because now if you're standing while you're doing an arm curl or a shoulder press, you're now more stable. You're going to increase that midline stability. So doing both of these exercises can be super beneficial to improve midline stability, contact with the ground, and better balance overall. So use these for about 30 seconds each in each direction. So it'll take you just a few minutes to do all of them, and you'll just go left and right with smooth pursuits, up and down, here and here for 30 seconds. Then you'll give yourself 2 targets and you'll do the same thing with your eyes. Now after you do that, go in and do your workout, do a workout that you normally do with weights and see how much stronger you feel. I guarantee you're gonna feel a lot stronger. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna flip over and I'm going to show you exactly how to do smooth pursuits and how to do saccades. I hope that you found this video helpful. Give these a try during your warm-up. If you have any questions or comments, leave them below in the comment section. And until next time, live healthy.