Staying Upright: How 3 systems, 1 brain, and specific training can help maintain your balance
Tomorrow officially starts the winter season. It’s cold and icy all over the place right now. In the spirit of this weather, I wanted to talk about balance, specifically physical upright balance so you can avoid an embarrassing fall and subsequent bruising, humiliation and pain because you couldn’t handle the black ice that’s secretly dwelling on the street corners of your city. Understanding helps you practice appropriately to improve your balance where it is weak. Anyone can do this. The process starts with communication between your awesome brain and three systems that interact with our body and the world around it.
Visual (eyes)
Your vision is a balancing system that is heavily relied upon. It is powerful and specific. Your eyes give you information about the world around you directly through visual inputs. This signal goes to your brain stem and is then communicated to your muscles and joints giving the correct formula of movements and muscles firing to keep you upright. Eyes can deceive you and definitely cannot see everything around you; fortunately there are two more systems working in the background, keeping you upright.
Proprioception (hands, feet, body)
Your ability to feel the world around you paints a picture in your mind. This helps you stay balanced and more aware of objects in space when you move. Your feet and hands are paramount in this system because they are in contact with the majority of surfaces and therefore have developed large sensory systems resulting in specific feedback to your brain. The information gathered from touch goes to your brain stem again communicating with the musculoskeletal system to properly fire the correct muscles. Loss of vision or moving in the dark requires this system to work more efficiently. Stubbed toes can be a common occurrence when this system is not working properly.
Vestibular (inner ears)
Among other things, your ears have sets of three tubes inside that contain a signaling system. Movement of your head moves the fluid in these tubes signaling to your brain that you are tilting or are off-center in some way. This system is really useful when your vision is impaired or gone and the surface you are being supported by becomes unstable. Your inner ears will make sure you keep your head upright, giving your body a sense of direction and helping the other systems catch back up. Damage to this system results in dizziness and a subsequent impairment in the other two systems resulting in uncomfortable losses of balance.
It is useful to practice isolating each of these systems when you are doing physical activity in order to refine the functionality of each system individually so they interact better together.
*Performing plyometric and balance exercises will improve all three systems because they all available and work together to help you stay upright.
*Eliminating your vision (closing your eyes) forces you to practice with only the proprioceptive and vestibular systems.
*Doing exercises on unstable or compliant surfaces will impair your proprioceptive system forcing you to rely more on your visual and vestibular systems.
*Closing your eyes and doing exercise on an unstable surface will impair your proprioception and eliminate your vision forcing you to almost exclusively rely on your vestibular system.
Check out my most recent HIIT workout "Black Ice Melter" for more specific exercises that target these systems.
Stay healthy everyone,
-Michael
