Balance and Coordination. Why its important to do this FIRST!

Balance and coordination are a huge part to having a healthy, strong, mobile body that can let you do whatever you want for the rest of your life. But too often people either try to rush it in with a bunch of other things they're going to do for the workout or decide that I'm not balanced or coordinated and that's just the way I am. Well, that's just not true and there's a lot you can do about it, so stay tuned. In this video, we're going to talk in depth about balance and coordination. Greetings. My name is Ekimbaso. I own Soul Core Fitness and and I've been in the health and fitness field for 30 years. I'm a Soma therapist and Soma trainer. So I'm a manual therapist and I'm a trainer and I do this all underneath the osteopathic model, which is structure dictates function. Now, it never fails. Whenever I'm with people or teaching classes, I always come across people who are uncoordinated and don't have very good balance. And those people either say, that's the way I am or, or stop and take the time to get better. The people who get better are the ones who realize, okay, I am not coordinated balance, but there's something I can do about it. The other people are living in self, self, self fulfilling prophecy, right? Because if you take the time to do the little things to improve it, your body will improve. And then with better balance and coordination, those same people gain better strength and mobility. Because the body works holistically, everything works together to help each other out. And so that's what I talk about on this channel. It's a holistic view on the body. So if you're interested in that, then please subscribe to this channel then to help me out. If you could like this video and share with your friends, it not only shares the video with people who might like it, but it tells YouTube that it's a good video and it will share it with more people as well. If you don't have balance and coordination, then your strength program, your mobility program will be not as effective. Your body wants to self preserve itself. So if I'm doing strengthening exercises and I'm wobbling a little bit, then the body goes, don't care about the strengthening, I want to not fall. Or if you try and do a stretch and again you're wobbling and it doesn't have to be huge wobbling, it can be a little micro wobbling. Again your body goes, don't care about stretching. I don't want to fall. So if you don't have that good balance, your body can't strengthen stretches effectively. And if you can't coordinate your movements, the movements between your brain and your body, that communication, if you're not as coordinated, then when you do your exercises again, they won't be as effective because you're not as coordinated. So your body's like trying to figure out what you want to do, right? So it's trying to figure out what you want to do instead of doing what you need to do to get strong and mobile. And so it's for that reason, because we all know this, right? It's for that reason. When you walk into a gym, you see a whole bunch of people stopping, not going to the workout, in the classes or on the machines, they stop and do a balance and coordination program. They do not. Unfortunately, they don't, because one, they don't know what to do, right? So use the general public. You go, yes, I need balance and coordination. I don't know. I can stand on one foot. And then if you go see a trainer, like a regular trainer, unfortunately they don't know too much more than you do. So they'll have you stand on one foot and do some movements, or maybe have you stand on a Bosu ball and do some movements. Well, that's not the answer. And then the gym you're going to obviously doesn't care about balance coordination. They just want you to pay your monthly fee each month. And let's say you're proactive. You're proactive. Like, okay, I know I don't need to do that. Trainer doesn't know what he's doing. Let me, let me go find some answers. And when you open up the magazines or read the article on the Internet, unfortunately it's the same information. Something standing on one foot or standing on a Bosu ball, like, it's the same stuff. Well, there's a lot more to it than that, and we're going to dig into it. Let's start with balance first. So balance and how balanced you are will lead to how strong and mobile you can be. Let's take example of a house, right? So house that can walk. So if that house that can walk, the walls, floors and roof are in place, then it functions properly. Functions properly means that the lights can turn on, people can sit on a couch without fear of dying, all the piping works properly. And if the owner of that house wants to put a second level on it, it can handle it because it's balanced and has enough force, AKA strength, to handle it. If it was off balance, then the lights wouldn't work. People couldn't live there. There's no way you could put a second level in the house because it would totally collapse. So if your body's unbalanced, then the more force you put on it, and not just with working out, even just with life, leads to the potential more of a collapse of your body. So how to have good balance? So first you want to have good balance by a good plumb line. A good plumb line means that my ear, shoulder, hip and ankle relatively line up in one straight line. You can do this with a transcendental reference. So like this bar right here. So I can stand in front of this bar properly, position my feet on the line, and then somebody can look at me relative to this bar because this is straight. Am I straight to the bar? And then when you do it, you want to turn to the other side because you very much could have an asymmetry. You could have one side line up properly, then you turn on the same line with the same reference. Turns down a reference and it can be totally off. That's going to tell you whether you have a good plumb line posture. The second part is a good gravity line. A gravity line is a inverse 4 degree cone that we should be able to stand in. Right? So here's my inverse 4 degree cone. If I'm inside this cone, then things work nicely. I have good balance, I have good posture. I can micromanage myself through the day if I'm outside this cone. Let's say, for example, I'm out in front of the cone. So right, I'm in front right now. My body has to use all its energy to keep me from falling again. We go back to self preservation. I'm outside the cone, my body goes, oh crap, I don't want to fall. So now it uses all its energy to keep me up. Because it cares about not functioning properly. It cares about not getting hurt and be able to brush my teeth, eat my food, look, see where I'm going? That's what it cares about, just functioning normal. Not in a positive way, just to kind of survive and make it through life. So you want to have a good gravity line on top of that. You also want to have good balancement in your body. By balancement I mean everything is in place and doing its job. Your body's interdependent and interconnected. It all works together. It's called holistic. And so if everything's doing its job in the proper place. It keeps me in a solid foundation. A solid foundation allows my body to be strong and mobile. How's your balance of coordination? Let me know in the comments and then stay tuned when we delve into the coordination part. A coordinated body and brain allows for ease and efficiency in life and in your workouts. So this coordination is done through afferent and efferent signals, signals that go to and from the brain and body. These are done through. Through proprioceptors. Proprioceptors are little computers. We have thousands of computers in our body. The more these computers are turned on in our body, and the more they can communicate to the brain and back to the body, the better neuroengram we have of the different activities it moves in our body. So right now, your brain has an idea of how you should move and what your posture should be. It's right or wrong, we don't know. But you can change that by learning a new skill to reorganize that map in your brain. Now, these proprioceptors can be trained just in general, when you do a stretch, an exercise, or some tension, or they can be trained specifically to have one turned on. An example is I love skiing. And so back when I was young, when I first learned skiing, it was. It took a lot of energy and a lot of effort to learn to ski. Now, a billion years later, when I go ski, it doesn't take a lot of effort at all because I've dealt with so much load. So I went skiing so many times that that neural map in my brain of skiing is very effective, right? So now when I go skiing, I kind of just know what to do. So when you train your body, that's what you want to do, because the more education you give it for what you want to do, the more it's going to respond. So this leads to one proper training in terms of starting segmental, which is small, and working up to bigger, and also making sure that you train these proprioceptors if you need to, specifically. So. So when I train my body, I want to start from small to big, right? Train from in to out. I do this because now my body will have more balance and more proprioceptors from my brain to my body. Because when I think of a movement from my brain to my body, it goes through the small muscles first, then out to the big muscles. So if I start those small segmental muscles first, like your transverse spinalis and stuff like that, then my movements will be more coordinated because the highway. The highway is more open now. I could do that through general working out. It'll turn on a lot of them, right? So whatever I do, it'll turn on some of those because I need to coordinate that area. But if I have an area that, say, needs more love, then I do a specific exercise to turn that one on more and then bring it back and integrate it back into the body. I know it's a lot, but that's the body. Now, a couple points on working coordination and balance. You want to start with literally two feet on the ground and a stable surface. We're obsessed now with circus tricks and working out the crazier, more unstable. It must be better for you. I had a guy tell me he went to a class up in the local community center, and this guy was like, taking a ball and doing, like, Globetrotter type things. And he's like, I should be able to do that. I'm like, why should you be able to do that? He goes, well, it's better for my body. Like, when is that going to show up in your life? Do you. Do you play basketball? He goes, no. I'm like, well, general coordination and balance is probably better for you than trying to coordinate under, leg, through the ear, back, behind, all that stuff, right? Here's an example, a better example. So a long time ago, I was in a gym and this old man was there with a trainer, and this old man was doing the old man shuffle, right? That's how he walked. And they're going from exercise to exercise. And I was watching him because again, I was getting a little nervous. And I had right to be nervous because he took that man in that shuffle and stood him in a Bosu ball. So for those who don't know, it's a flat surface with a unstable ball underneath. Probably a picture I'll put for you. And he had him stand on that and start to work out, and they had him get on one foot. Well, you see where this is going, right? The old man fell and really hurt himself. That guy couldn't walk, right? He could barely walk and shuffle. He needs to learn to walk and move those muscles better and to do a regular squat or whatever you want to do before he stands on an unstable surface. But we have an attention span issue here in the United States. And so people don't want to take the time to do the basic stuff to move on to the other they call fun stuff, right? They want to just jump to the crazy things they see in these magazines and on Instagram and That's a wrong way of going about it. That's what you need for balance, coordination. Now, I know I didn't give you those proverbial two, three exercises that everybody wants to correct what they got going on, because again, that doesn't work. I mean, just think about all the things I just told you. How many parts of the body are involved in what I just told you. Pretty much the whole body. So I don't know what you need for your balance and coordination. What I do know is that everybody needs a holistic fitness program that works you from the inside out, builds a foundation which allow you to do more of whatever you want to do. If that's working out harder, great. If that's gardening, if that's skiing, if that's playing with your kids, or whatever it is that's going to allow you to do more. Now, unfortunately, you can't do this by just going to different classes and trying to piece it together. You can't do it by reading an article or a book and following along with the pictures. You need to be taught this. And then also learn by doing. By being taught, you understand the philosophy and what you need to do. And then by learn by doing, you go and practice and learn what to do. By practice, I mean you try, you get it wrong. You try, you get it wrong, then you try and get it right. It's all good on the process of learning. And that's what you need because eventually you want your body to just be able to be able to do it. Now, I can help you with that. If you'd like. I can help you with a free download book, the Four Steps to a Strong Mobile Life, in Description. Below again, you'll find a link. Or I can help you with a consultation where you can reach out and talk about where you are now, where you want to go, and your sticking points. And then I'll offer you advice, no matter what. And if I see you're a good fit, I'll offer my services, but no obligation. So I hope that you got some good information about this. Stay tuned for next week for the next video.