Knowing THIS will help your balance to NOT fall

Feeling like you don't have good balance and always scared that you're going to fall and hurt yourself is exhausting. It's exhausting because you're scared all the time. Your life is inhibited. You don't know what activities you could do. You're always worried if this next activity is going to cause you to totally screw up your life. So you want to improve your balance. But improving your balance is not just about staying on one foot and doing a bunch of different activities. It's about the totality of your body being in balance. All your little proprioceptors in your body, your computers being turned on and certain parts of your body being significantly strong or mobile to help keep you in balance. So I want you to stay tuned to find out what I mean. Take a second here though to subscribe. Hit that bell and you'll be notified each week when we put out new videos on how best to balance and strengthen your body so you can have a body that works for you to live your life how you want. I'm Akim Ashell and before becoming a soma therapist and a soma trainer, which is kind of like a physical therapist, I followed all the conventional thought frames on how to best balance your body, strengthen your body, you know, to have the body that works for you. But I realized that these cookie cutter routines, as being shown this repetitive information I kept hearing wasn't the answer, it was too general. So I decided to delve down the rabbit hole to find out more about the complexity of the body. The body works on complexity and interdependence and interrelations. Once I start to figure out all these friendly exercises and stretches and techniques that you could do, my body and all my clients bodies start to respond by waking up, getting stronger, more mobile, having more awareness. And so I'm on a mission to expound this information to you. I know it's easy to think about, basically it's easier or nicer to think about a set of things I can do. I can check it off my box and okay, I've accomplished this, but unfortunately that doesn't work for the body. It's much more complex than that. You have to take into consideration all the different aspects that needs to be addressed, but more importantly, all the aspects that you need to address. Going down this road may be a little more confusing, maybe take a little more time at the beginning and maybe a little frustrating. But that's what happens when you want to re educate your body. It's not I show you something and you Just duplicate it and get it. You have to figure out how it's working for you, how to adapt for you, what different things to add toward you. By doing that, even though it's a little bit more difficult at the beginning, in a long run, it works. As opposed to if you take the other route, just take some sort of cookie cutter routine. Sure, it feels better, makes you feel safe, because, hey, everybody's doing it, so it must work for me. But it doesn't work, and now you're wasting your time. And you're also taking yourself down the wrong road. Because when you do a cookie cutter routine, if it's not specialized for you, you're doing something, you're moving right, your body's moving around. But all that movement is in education. Is that education something your body needs, or is it take you down the wrong educational road? So hopefully you can see this as we go through and talk about balance. So I'm about to give you a lot of information on all the different aspects that contribute to balance. As you go through, try and see where you might be deficient. But because you can't do all the things I tell you right away, you need to slowly build into it. So you take one, two, three things, and you practice that. Once you practice that, then you can move on to the other ones. So just get a notepad out, start taking notes, and see where you would be more advantageous to start with. So to have good balance, you first and foremost want to be balanced, even like a house. So your structure, everything's in place. That's the first step, to balance. If you don't have a structure that's balanced in place, then you're constantly off balance. There's no way to not be. So standing on one foot and twirling your eyes and whatever, doesn't make any difference if you come down and you're always on balance. If I have my feet nice and solid, all the forces through my body can kind of come up through my feet to my head nicely. If my body's balanced, the forces that come down through my head can go through my body properly. I can hold myself in what's called my postural cone. Good posture, which is an inverse 4 degree of cone. I can manage myself. I can allow basically these different aspects of my body to communicate to my brain, to always tell me where I'm in balance. So we're going to go through these aspects of structure, the symbiotic relations between strength and mobility, your appropriate setups, your computers and certain parts of your body that are more advantageous to train for balance. So the structure of your body, as I mentioned just a second ago, is the first place you want to start with being balanced. So I want you to use your imagination a little bit. Imagine that your body is like the structure of a house. You want your walls on either side to be straight and lined up, the front and back walls to be lined up. You want your roofs and your different floors, your body to be nice and even. That way the house, your body has good balance. It's solid. If that balance is off because I have too far forward on one side of my wall or my roof is a little far forward, then I don't care what you do. Your house, you is always off balance because that structure is always off balance. That's mainly going to come through the alignment of your bones. So your bones are hard, but they're also soft. They're also soft tissue, but they have a system within them called your trabecular system. So it's kind of like rebarb in a building. So it kind of holds everything in place and lines up the forces. But this rebar inside your bones, the trabecular system is moldable. There's a law called wolf's law, and it says that I don't have it exactly, but that your bone will mold to the forces that you put on it. So however you're balanced, those rebars line up. If you're balanced properly, great. The rebar and the trabecular system can take their forces up and down through your body. It doesn't stop it in place. Weird. And you always feel balanced. But if you have something off, let's say, say your hip is too far forward or and your hip is compact a little bit, and the forces are now not here, but kind of like open towards you a little bit. Well, now your bone will remodel to that force. That force is not correct, obviously, because it's not advantageous. It's not the way the body was designed to move. So now it remolds retribution, something. That's a word. The trabecular system remodels to that line of force, and now it's lined up for that. Improper force make you out of balance all the time. How do you fix this? Well, easy way is to get adjustments, but that's not the only way. Because even if you need adjustment, and you might not, you still have to work with the soft tissue. The soft tissue always wins. And we'll talk about that more in a little bit. The soft tissue has the information, the education. The soft tissue includes your tendons, ligaments, muscles and all the fascia connects all your body, all that fascia and all that stuff tissue have a place in your brain and a map. And that map and brain coordinates with your soft tissue and says, okay, that's where it's supposed to be. So even if you have to go get an adjustment and that map in your brain still has a different idea of where it wants to go, that person can put it back in place and. But the soft tissue says, I think we're supposed to be over here, eventually pulls back out of place. So if you do have to get an adjustment, make sure that practitioner works with the soft tissue a lot. Turns it off, turns it on, stimulates it, opens it up. That way, when the adjustment happens, the adjustment will happen nicely because the soft tissue says, thank you so much. If they don't work with the soft tissue and just jump off the top turnbuckle and crack your back or something like that, then maybe they might move the bone. But that soft tissue is so terrified at that force, it contracts and reacts and doesn't allow the contract, the contraction, doesn't allow the movement of the bone to work properly. In case, whether you get an adjustment or not, you need to have corrective exercises to re educate your soft tissue to keep your bones in place. So again, like that map I just talked about, you want that map to be correct. So right now the map is leading you down to left, but you want to go right. Okay, what do I have to do? I have to undo this line to the left. I have to redo the line to the right. It's not as easy as just erasing and drawing. You have to tell all the different muscles. Okay, you need to be doing this job and not this bad job. So you have tons of exercises you can use, but that kind of where you want to go with your soft tissue relative to your bones. So to further expand on the structure relative to soft tissue. So you have the idea of the house, which is kind of more the bones we're talking about, but now we want to talk about tensegrity. So tensegrity is a term by Buckmeister Fuller, who is an architect, and they use this philosophy of tensegrity in building buildings, bridges, and stuff like that. I guess some of the most famous ones are the Golden Gate Bridge or like the Dome of Montreal. Those are tensegrity structures. That philosophy seemed to work with the body by a bunch of really smart people. And they use tensegrity in the Body, which is now called biotensegrity. It just means that all the forces that go through your body need to go through your body and not stop in one place. You should have equal amounts of. Of strength or mobility or tension and compression, as they call it, to keep your body balanced. Because unlike a house, which is more Newtonian, we're not structure on structure. Our bones shouldn't be stacked on top of each other. If they are, our physiology would look a lot different and we would have a lot of osteoarthritis. That's what osteoarthritis is. If something touches, when it touches and you move, it rubs. But you don't want that in the body. So we use the soft tissue in our body, the muscles, the tendons, the ligaments, and all the fascia, how it connects to keep our body in place. So you do that through exercises. Now, each muscle has different ways you want to strengthen it. It's not just one muscle. Each tendon ligament needs to be specifically told what to do. And everything needs to kind of work as one. Because one of the philosophies of biotensegrity is that we're interconnected and interdependent. That means it all works together. That is holistic. So this is where your job begins, is to find out what muscles are weak that are contributing to you being off balance, or what muscles aren't mobile, or what tendons and ligaments need to be turned on for you to have that good balance structure. There's one really important muscle that we can give an example with and talk about how it needs to be strong and mobile and how important it is in your. In your balance. So your pelvis is basically a floor of your body that connects your upper half and your lower half. That floor needs to be. Even if it's not even then the upper and lower half will always be off balance. So if my hip is always up or down, I always have an unbalanced structure, always. One reason why that could be off balance is your glute med, your hip muscle. The glute med runs all the way from part of the front part of the hip with the TFL to the side, all the way back to your glute max. It's like one big muscle on your hip. One of his main jobs is, is to hold your pelvis in place all day long. Like the walls of this building. These walls of the building need to be strong enough. And, well, not the building, but you need to be mobile enough to keep your pelvis balanced. The Whole time. This is demonstrated by a law called Pascal's. You can look it up and I'll put the term in the description. But Pascal's law talks about how one hip needs to be a certain amount of strength relative to stepping on one foot to keep your pelvis in place so that you don't have a bunch of crazy stuff happening in your body as you just move around in life. You can test this a couple different ways. The glute mean. You can test this. So you can do a step up test where you step up onto a step. And then if your pelvis moves too much out of place, like your hip kicks out or up or off to the other side, that's called a Trendelberg Trendelenburg sign. That means your glute means not strong enough to hold your hip in place as you go unipodal, which is one leg at a time. But you can also test this in the strengthening position. So for example, the one I like the most. So you're lying on your side, your bottom hip is bent to 90, your head is between your shoulders, your shoulder stacked, hips stacked. So you have a nice straight top posture. This gives you a relatively good base and fixed point. Because we're now going to work in chest the right side. The right leg should be straight and in first position. To have your legs stacked on top of your bottom leg. You're going to pull your right toe in, turn your right leg to the ground so your toe touches the ground and push your heel away to keep your leg locked. This is going to test the back part of your glute med more towards your glute max. Your butt. You start to lift up and down. If you're able to lift up and down properly for a lot of Reps, let's say 50, and you don't bend your knee or use your torso, then you have a pretty good mead. As you go through this. If it's difficult to lift up and down, you can't get very many. You can't have good form. Ding, ding, ding. You've now self assessed that you have a weak glued mead. But you've only tested the posture. The back part. You can also take this into a 170 degree position, your hip and also 185 or so behind your hip to test the middle and the front part. I won't take too much time but, but you can test all the three different fibers of the glute med to make sure it's working properly, to make sure that your hips stay in Place. I'll give you a little pro tip here on the position I just talked about. I like the position much better than other things you may have seen, like the clam or the standing one where you abduct, which is pull your leg out to the side and adduct your leg, pull it back in, because one relative to the clam, there's more direct tension on the three different fibers of the glute mead. If I have three different fibers, I need three different postures to solicit the three different fibers. If I have one posture like the clam, maybe I'm getting a little bit of the middle one. Not too much the front, not too much back. Like any muscle, if I have one part that's strong, the other parts are weak. It throws that whole total muscle off. And I like it more than a standing one because there's too many moving joints, not enough fixed point. You're too off balance because your body doesn't give a hoot about strengthening. If you're worried about balance and trying to hold yourself up and kick it out, there's also not a relative fixed point. So as you bring your leg out, are you moving from your glute med or did you switch your quad? Did you use your oblique? Are you using something else besides the glute med to lift up and down? And for those who have done it, the. The sideline one, who've done the other ones before, you know when you're doing it right because you feel the glute mead turn on. The last factor we want to look at are all the little computers in your body called proprioceptors. And there's certain parts of your body that are a little more important than the rest relative to your balance. So your brain decides where you are in space. Relative to the education from your feet, your spine, your tmj, your eyes and your ears, they all send signals back to your brain saying, here we are in space. If one of those areas is a little off because of whatever, any information that goes back to your brain is a little off, it corrupts the totality of where your body thinks it's space. You can tell because I sure you've seen this, where people think they're standing straight and they're off, that feels straight to them because in their brain it tells them, okay, that's straight. Because somewhere or a couple places, it tells them this is straight. Obviously, that's wrong, right? So to correct this, you need to train these areas, specifically proprioceptors in the body so if I had all my proprioceptors on in those areas, my feet, my, my spine, tmj, eyes and ears were on. I now have good awareness. I understand where I am in space. I have good control of my body and I can maintain myself in my 4 degree cone. If I'm off with proprioceptors, if I'm off those basic areas, then I'm falling outside that cone constantly. Not only are you constantly off balance, unaware and about to fall, you're expending a bunch of energy. You don't need to because you're not allowing the small muscles and the proprioceptors to do their job. The body goes, well, I don't want to fall on my face. I need to keep my eyes forward so I know where I'm going. Then I need to use my big muscles. That's not their job. Their job is not to hold you in space, it's to do big things like lift things and stuff like that. So when I'm telling my big muscles to hold me in place, that puts a lot of energy. So all day long I'm trying to hold myself up. And then you get home at night, you're like, oh, my body aches and I'm so tired. Because you're not keeping yourself in your cone. If I keep myself in that cone, I use less energy, I have better balance, I feel better now. Training proprioceptors and those specific areas of your body I talked about is very similar to training the muscles. And a glute med example I did before, it needs to be specific because if it's not specific, then the awake proprioceptors will do the job of the asleep proprioceptors. They won't do them as well, but they'll never allow the area that you need to get trained. Your body will always go, I don't know, I just need to keep myself standing up. So I'm going to keep myself going in that position. So you have to be specific. So take this example of this knee image you're going to put up here. So you see a bunch of ligaments in the knee. There's more of them that we see here. But I want you to give a good example. There's a lot more. Each one of these ligaments has a different proprioceptive inside them. Well, because each of these ligaments are in a different place, connected to different things, they need to be put into a different posture. You can't do the same posture for each one. You have to Modify each one because if you don't, you won't be specific to what ligament, what proprioceptor that you need. I hope that was really helpful. I hope you have some things to think about now. I hope you're taking all this information and thinking about, okay, where do I need to start for this? Because it's all about the progress and the process. It's not about getting it done right away, it's about learning what to do in your brain and in your body. If you're looking for a little help along this road, then I'd love to be able to help you out. In the description below I've got a link for a consultation. It's free, where we can kind of talk about where you are, where you want to go and I'll give you impart as much information I can and give you a good path forward. If that path forward involves working with us, then I'll make sure you're a good fit first and give you what your options are. If you're not just ready yet, but you kind of like what you've heard and you want to learn more, then also in the description I've got a free resource on how to get out of pain, get mobile, but more importantly get a body that works for you to be sustainable again. After you click the link, fill in your information and you'll get it out asap. Stay tuned in this next video and how to use your core to protect your lower back. Don't forget to subscribe and hit that bell. Please like and share this video so that others who find it useful can find it. And please remember that it's not just working out, it's a chance to build a foundation for a better life.