Today we’re gonna talk about upgrading your inner ear training, utilizing a slant board. If you never stood on one of these things, it’s pretty simple. It’s, it’s a fake hill. We use these all the time, however, to improve the results of basic vestibular drills. Now, the vestibular system, if you don’t know this, you’re new to Z- Health, new to brain-based training. It’s your inner ear sensors, right? We have five basic things in each inner ear. We have three canals and two, what are called otilith organs. And these allow our head and body to know where we are in space so we don’t fall over.
Now when you look at the neurophysiology, however, the vestibular system is vital for extensor tone, right? Anti-gravity muscles. Everyone talks about the posterior chain. We wanna improve the posterior chain so that athletes perform better and people are outta back pain. Well, if their inner ear is messed up. Guess what? The posterior chain has a very difficult time doing its job, so you can’t just be overly focused on glutes and hamstrings and low back muscles. You have to look at all the systems.
So we spend a lot of time evaluating the vestibular system. One of the most basic exercises is called an AVOR that stands for angular vestibulo-ocular reflex, and there will be a quiz at the end.
What that basically means is that I have to stare at something and then turn my head, back and forth or nod my head up and down or do diagonals, and as I’m doing that, my eyes are not allowed to lose the target. In other words, I can’t move off of them and then back onto them. More importantly, the client or your athlete or you, if you’re doing this as you’re doing these motions at about this speed, this should remain clear.
I can read a book, I can do anything. That’s the whole point of the VOR is to maintain visual clarity while the head is in motion. Once you are actually good at that, then you can stand in a bunch of, you know. Single leg stance is a whatever, and you don’t lose balance because it’s improving your inner ear.
It’s improving your overall postural stability. We wanna add some challenge to it. One of the best ways to do that, a fun way as well, is use a slant board.
For this exercise you’re gonna get on the slant board, and in this particular case, my toes are down. If my toes are down, I am gonna naturally going to want to extend to prevent myself from falling forward.
So I am actually encouraging some increase extensor tone. Just in this position. Now I begin doing my VORs here. All right, so really, really simple. Same thing. I’m gonna be doing about 30 seconds of what are called yeses and nos. You can just do it that way. If you are more advanced, you can add in your angular motions about 30 seconds each time, and you wanna notice if that impacts your body differently than when you’re doing it in a neutral stance, not on a board.
Now, to make this more interesting, however, we want to keep shifting our center of mass, and this is based on a couple of new studies that have come out showing that if the center of mass has shifted while we’re doing this, we get a longer and larger improvement in vestibular function.
So now I’m on a, the slant board. I’m gonna try and stand up straighten this upper leg a little bit. So I’m tilted and I’m now really struggling against gravity as I’m going through my VORs. This is gonna upregulate your vestibular system because we’re now adding some additional challenge to it. Then I’m going to put my toes uphill.
So now I’m gonna want to lean forward a little bit and I’m gonna repeat, and then I will finally do my fourth version where I am again on the downside of the hill trying to stay upright while I’m doing my VORs. If you work all the way through this, you’re gonna spend about two minutes in each position as you go through at least four different head motions. 30 seconds per so you’re talking about an eight to 10 minute training program, which is a lot of head shaking. So it is possible for you to get really dizzy if you start to feel uncomfortable. Just do 10 seconds and then build up over time. It may also mean that you need to go back a little bit, regress it, but this is a great tool to keep number one exercise interesting, and number two, to drive additional input into the vestibular system to improve posture, improve balance. It is something I highly encourage you to do and also to test with your clients, assuming they are ready for it.
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