Simple trick to improve balance and stability

Hi, I'm Bill from Beyond Fitness Online, and today I want to show you a simple trick using the cranial nerves in your head to help improve a lot of things, including your balance, stability, strength, and mobility. That nerve that we're going to be working on is called the vestibulocochlear nerve, and that's also known as cranial nerve 8. You have one on each side of your body, and its job is to take any signals from the ear To the brain. So that signals for sound, but also for your vestibular system. Your vestibular system tells your brain which way you're moving in space in relation to gravity. So it tells your brain if you're moving your head, if you're moving your body, and it also tells your brain what kind of sounds you're hearing and where they might be coming from depending on how the pathway goes. So what you'll want to do is determine which side you may have a deficit on. Now, if you don't— if you tell me, I I can hear equally on both sides. I don't have any balance issues. You'll still want to test this because sometimes the difference might be slight, but then when you test it, you're like, oh wow, there's a difference there. You fix that and everything starts to get better. So check this video out right here. It's a video I did a while back about how to test which side you may have a vestibular deficit on. Now don't worry about the fix part of that. Just worry about trying to get the test where you're standing in the different positions with your eyes closed and see if you're falling to one side or the other. After you've done that, then you'll want to start to stimulate it. So let's just say it's on this side of my body that I want to stimulate that nerve a little bit more. I can do a couple different things. I can play sound. So you may want to just listen to your music while you're working out just on this side. That might be enough to stimulate that. You may also want to do some vestibular exercises where you're doing head turns with your eyes fixed to that direction. You may want to do some head tilts or other vestibular exercises. I've got lots of videos on my channel about vestibular exercises, so you can try any of those to the weaker side. You also may want to look at the neighboring nerves, cranial nerve 7 and 9. So cranial nerve 9 has to do with the back of the throat, so you could try gargling water specifically to that side, or you could try making facial expressions, which is cranial nerve 7, so smiling, Just on that one side of your body, on one side of your face. And that may also, along with the sound and vestibular exercises that you're doing, really upregulate that nerve and really start to balance things out. So go ahead and give these a try. Tell me in the comments below what worked best for you. And if you have any questions, let me know. If you haven't already, please subscribe to my channel. I post new updates every Friday. And until next time, live healthy.