If I had to fix my body from scratch, this is what I would do. Now, this may sound like a weird topic, but I’ve actually been asked this question many times on podcasts and everything else. So I’m going to give you our framework from a brain-based perspective, and I’m going to give you some little ideas and demos about how this could be applied to all of us.
Because this idea is very cool, it’s like, okay, if I was going to start from the beginning, how could I optimize performance? Well, there’s really six stages, all right?
The first thing that I would start with is breathing. Why breathing? Well, it’s the foundation for most of us, for everything that we’re going to do in life. We talk a lot about movement as movement professionals, but we have to recognize that moving our eyes and breathing are things that we do far more than almost anything else.
We breathe 24,000 to 25,000 times a day. And so incorrect breathing patterns can cause tremendous issues in everything that we do. They can affect our ability to stabilize our body, to develop force. They can play a big role in multiple iterations of pain and performance issues, so I would start with breathing.
Another reason we have to look at breathing is we know that the human brain is in charge of all this stuff. The nervous system is the control system for everything that I want to fix as a performing human being, and my brain is driven by the balance, the appropriate balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide.
So if I have problems with my breathing, it’s going to affect blood flow to the brain, brain function, and so breathing is always a great place to start.
As a simple example, pick something that you want to be better at. Maybe that’s rotating your spine. Maybe it’s laterally bending. Maybe it is touching your toes. Maybe it is lifting a certain weight. I don’t care what it is right now, but let’s just do a couple of breathing things and see what happens.
So let’s say for me, I want to work on my rotation. It feels pretty good right now. My forward bend feels pretty good as well, but let’s say I want to affect it with my breathing. How would I start?
Well, you want to start off just with the basics. Can I do a good 360 degree expansion in my breathing?
A lot of people in the movement industry have been teaching for years: do belly breathing, which is kind of a horrible way to coach that. It’s a good idea, but it’s a horrible way to coach it because people just wind up pushing their belly out and pulling it in.
The whole idea is actually cylindrical breathing, 360 degrees. Take your hands, put them around your waist, pinch like you’re a lobster. Now take a breath in.
Try to expand your full core, your front, your sides and your back so that your hand is forced open as you breathe. Do that three or four times. Notice if you have more problems on one side or the other and then you can shift up a little bit, do it closer to your lower ribs.
Once you’ve done that, you’ve just enhanced your awareness of 360 degree breathing. Then go back and retest whatever it is that you wanted to be better at.
So even though things felt pretty good to me, just by doing cylindrical breathing, all of a sudden I have improved range of motion. That’s one example.
We teach hundreds of different breathing exercises and ideas. So breathing sits at the top of my list.
Then we go to number two. What is number two? I have to see well.
So I tell people you’ve got to breathe well, you have to see well as number two.
When we talk about seeing well, what does that mean? Well, that’s not just how is my acuity. Is my vision 20/20? It’s also how do my eyes move? Are they able to converge well? Are they able to diverge well? Can I follow a moving object called a smooth pursuit? Can I jump back and forth in different directions to different objects? Those are called saccades.
These are very, very basic eye movements. But one of the things that I will tell you as a brain-based practitioner is that if you understand the eyes, the eyes are one of the best windows into overall brain function. And it is also one of the most powerful ways to quickly change what people are able to do with their body.
So again, if you’re going to rebuild from scratch, give yourself a great foundation, breathe well and then see well.
Let’s do a quick vision test and see if it changes something for you. So go back to whatever it is you were testing before. And now we’ll just work on your ability for your eyes to converge and diverge.
What does that mean? You’re going to take your finger, put it out in front of you. You’re going to focus on it and you’re going to bring it all the way into your nose. Your eyes should be doing this.
Have someone else watch you because if you can’t converge well, it will look like this. One eye will come in, the other one might not, or it’ll be slower or it’ll bounce around.
We want them to move symmetrically as much as possible. So we’re going to do that four or five times, converge, diverge as we push out. Converge, diverge as we push out, four or five times, and then retest.
And again, even for me, it made a little bit of difference. I’ve done way too much eye work in my life. But just understand that even for me, I can find improvements with my eyes. I just have to make it more specific.
But again, rebuilding from scratch, you’ve got to breathe well and you have to see well.
Next, you have to balance well.
So just do this for me. Stand on one leg, all right? Just stand on one leg, see how comfortable that is, and now I want you to move the non-standing leg around and make sure that you don’t fall over. Then I want you to turn your head left and right and then up and down and see if you can maintain balance.
In most cases, people that haven’t really changed or trained and challenged their vestibular system, their inner ear appropriately, may struggle with something literally as simple as standing on one leg with their eyes open and turning their head without falling over.
We as brain-based practitioners have placed an incredibly high value on your inner ear. It is the first neural system to develop fully when we are growing in utero and in infancy. Because guess what? The single most powerful force in your life is gravity.
You’ll be dealing with it from the moment you are born until the day that you die and our inner ear is in charge of that.
So even small problems with the inner ear, small problems with our balance can have enormous ramifications in our overall performance as human beings, the amount of pain we experience. And we now know that the vestibular system is linked to all kinds of stuff like anxiety and depression and cognitive challenges.
So we need to make sure that whenever we say, I want to breathe well, see well and then balance well, that balance isn’t just, hey, I can stand on a Bosu. Balance is much deeper than that. It means that if we want to build from scratch, we’re going to make sure that our inner ear is doing all the things that it needs to be able to do.
If you want to test it for yourself, you’ve already kind of done this, but let’s see if challenging it specifically can make a difference for whatever it is that you’re interested in.
So like I said, I’m just testing some range of motion. So let’s do this. Put your feet together. Put your finger out in front of you and we’re going to do what’s called a VOR. But we’re going to do a hard version of it because I want to challenge you.
You’re going to keep your eyes focused on your thumb the entire time and your nose is going to go up to the right and then down to the left, up right, down left, up right, down left, up right, down left. And then you’re going to do it the other side. Your nose is going to go up left, down right.
Now what we’re doing with this particular version of a VOR is we’re challenging two different canals, right? Parts of our vestibular system on each side.
It’s pretty easy for most people to do basic vestibular work, turning right and left, up and down. But whenever we start adding the diagonals, we’re asking the system to up its game a little bit.
And then we can make it even harder by doing all this while walking forward and backward. You can try all of those different things. But for now, you’ve just done five or six reps of up right down left and the opposite.
Check what you were looking at before. Now for me, those diagonals did pretty good. I actually got a little bit better range of motion for everything, both in my spinal rotation and my forward bend.
Again, I’m just giving you examples of how we go through system by system and how whenever we challenge those systems, the brain says, hey, this is pretty cool. And I’m going to allow you to move better and be a little bit stronger, right? Starting from scratch.
So once again, we have to breathe well. We have to see well. We have to balance well. Then we have to move well.
What does move well mean? It means that I need to have motor control capability of every joint in my body in the different planes of motion.
People have heard of frontal plane, sagittal plane, transverse plane. You need to be able to control all of your body parts individually in those planes and then work them in combinations.
As an example, whenever we look at the cervical spine, there’s a lot of stuff that the cervical spine can do. We can rotate. We can flex and extend. We can laterally bend. We can go into anterior and posterior gliding.
We can then combine those things together where we are now making circles. We can do sagittal plane motions where I’m going to the left. I’m going up. I’m going to the right. I’m going down so I can make these kinds of frontal plane circles.
So we have all these different ways that we can move our body.
Now a lot of people ask me, why would I spend time doing that? Well, your brain relies on the accuracy of input. It has to map every part of our body individually and then together.
And so what we have found over the years is that we need to be able to control and move every joint individually in as many iterations of plane or movement as possible. And then combine those because once you have all that in place, all of a sudden movement is less scary to your brain because it knows how things move.
It is very, very difficult for your brain to control you whenever you are asking it to do motions that it has never practiced. When it is asked to do something and it has not practiced, it is going to go into protective mode that’s going to reduce your range of motion, your strength, it’s going to make you stiff, it’s going to make you hurt.
So again, if I’m building from scratch, I want to make sure that I have all the eye movements available. I have all my inner ear systems working appropriately. I have individualized motor control of all my joints and all my body areas in different planes of motion.
Because what we see with aging is a progressive loss in many people of their ability to do what’s called dual tasking, where we’re asking them to do two different things or three different things or whatever at once.
And whenever we ask them to do that, very often we see the risk of falls, the risk of injury going up. And that is not because aging makes you necessarily bad at thinking. It’s that we often have failed as movement professionals to build thinking and dual task challenges into every single training session.
So again, if you ask me, hey, if you have to fix your body starting from scratch, what would you do? This is what I would do.
I would make sure that I was breathing well, that I dealt with my visual system, I dealt with my inner ear, I’d made sure that I mastered movement as much as possible in every joint under tension and not under tension. So there’s strength training and everything involved in that.
And then I would integrate all that together so I could do all of it dynamically.
And then finally, the final layer is making sure that I can maintain high degrees of working memory, speed of processing, etc. So cognitive function blended with movement.
Because guess what all that looks like? Real life.
So if you want to rebuild yourself, that’s the system, that’s the path. I’ve been working on this for three decades. That’s why we have a very extensive curriculum because every single one of these details you can dive into in depth because you’re going to run into problems that take depth to solve.
So if you are a movement professional, a doctor, a coach, a therapist of any kind, a movement coach of any kind and you’re interested in bridging the gap between what you learned in school and what you’re already amazing at with current modern neuroscience, we’d love to chat with you.
Go to the pinned comment. Click the link to send us an email or set up a call and we can see if we are a good fit.
Other than that, I hope you found this really interesting and thought provoking. If you have questions, let us know. Otherwise, good luck on optimizing yourself.
