Bill Daniels shows trainers how to spot vagus nerve dysfunction through a six-area assessment, starting with neck symptoms like swallowing trouble, dry mouth, and voice changes. He uses humming and head rotations to stimulate the medial vestibular nucleus and strengthen the core, improving voice quality and midline stability.
Hi, I'm Bill from Beyond Fitness Online. Today I want to answer a question that I've been getting a lot lately, and that is, as a personal trainer, how do I work with somebody with vagus nerve issues? So the way I would break that down is that there are basically 6 areas of the body that I kind of look at and assess each when I've determined that there's a vagus nerve issue. I generally will get a medical history from somebody and kind of get a background on what they've gone through, and if some of those answers are pointing towards vagus nerve issues, then we start looking at these different areas. So in the first part right here, we're going to talk about cervical issues. So this is anything in the neck. This will include problems with swallowing. This will include problems with dry mouth or coughing a lot for no reason. And usually that's a chronic issue. This also may have something to do with your voice. So if your voice seems deeper sometimes or higher at other times and you can't really tell why, it's because there's different impacts from the— on the vagus nerve. And the vagus nerve will cause voice changes when it's impacted or when it's stimulated the right way. So when I see this with people, the types of exercises I'm going to look towards doing Are exercises that are going to impact the medial vestibular nucleus, and you can check out a video on that right here. So what we want to do is we want to combine noise. We want to use humming or gargling to help stimulate that part of the vagus nerve, and then we want to do exercises where the head is moving on a target. So an exercise I might use here would be a cable rotation or a banded rotation where the band stays over here. And I've got my hands on the band, and as I'm turning, I'm turning my head with it and keeping it on there. So I'm getting a VORC, I'm getting abdominal strengthening, and I'll have them hum or gargle, usually hum because gargling is harder to do. Gargling might be better as a warm-up. And all of that will stimulate that part of the vagus nerve and really start to impact the results you get from that. You'll start to feel better. You might hear that your voice has changed and gotten a little bit deeper. And you might feel stronger through the midline. So in future videos, I'm gonna dive into the other 5 parts that the vagus nerve impacts. But if you wanna catch those, you gotta subscribe. So go ahead and subscribe to my channel. I'll post these updates every Friday for the next 5 weeks after this. And until next time, live healthy.
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