THE HUMAN BALANCE SYSTEM
Good balance is often taken for granted. Good balance is often taken for granted. Most people don’t find it difficult to walk across a gravel driveway, transition from walking on a sidewalk to grass, or get out of bed in the middle of the night without stumbling. However, with impaired balance such activities can be extremely fatiguing and sometimes dangerous. Symptoms that accompany the unsteadiness can include dizziness, vertigo, hearing and vision problems, and difficulty with concentration and memory.
With gravity endlessly weighing down on us, it’s a good thing that we have antigravity muscles and stabilizers throughout our musculoskeletal systems. These muscles work to support our joints and bones so they stay properly aligned against the pressure.
These antigravity muscles are commonly referred to as the “core,” but they include far more than just your abs.
Your deep antigravity muscles begin down at the feet and include muscles as high up as behind your eyes.
To maintain proper joint alignment, these muscles need to be strong and balanced throughout the body. This is why correct posture is essential for your musculoskeletal health.
How Gravity and Posture Interact
Maintaining your antigravity muscles is a crucial way to prevent musculoskeletal pain and injury. These muscles also maintain balance, helping us exert power in sports and our simple daily activities.
As soon as we start moving as a newborn, our antigravity muscles begin developing. We begin with kicking, rolling, rocking, and eventually kneeling. Then, we are crawling and sitting. Only after developing the muscles to perform these actions, can we begin walking against the force of gravity.
At first, we most likely will fall. But we get back up, always learning and strengthening our bodies until we have impressive alignment with the ability to run, jump, and tumble. However, as we age, we often find ourselves doing less of these fundamental actions. We spend long hours sitting for school or work and the time we do have to ourselves is often spent on technology or resting.
The Dangers of a Sedentary Lifestyle
Our bodies begin to deteriorate without the support of important anti-gravity muscles. This leads to changes in our alignment from our head and shoulders to our knees and toes.
The more time we spend sitting, the more our antigravity muscles atrophy.
Running, jumping, or even walking under the force of gravity can become high-risk activities with a much higher possibility of injury and poor posture.
To combat this problem, it is essential that we reactivate these core muscles.
The Coordinated Balance System
The human balance system involves a complex set of sensorimotor-control systems. Its interlacing feedback mechanisms can be disrupted by damage to one or more components through injury, disease, or the aging process. Impaired balance can be accompanied by other symptoms such as dizziness, vertigo, vision problems, nausea, fatigue, and concentration difficulties.
The complexity of the human balance system creates challenges in diagnosing and treating the underlying cause of imbalance. The crucial integration of information obtained through the vestibular, visual, and proprioceptive systems means that disorders affecting an individual system can markedly disrupt a person’s normal sense of balance. Vestibular dysfunction as a cause of imbalance offers a particularly intricate challenge because of the vestibular system’s interaction with cognitive functioning, 2 and the degree of influence it has on the control of eye movements and posture.
Science of Body Alignment and Body Awareness
Posture is defined as the position in which one holds the body upright against gravity while standing, sitting, or lying down. Posture is set and maintained by the central nervous system, which coordinates various muscles. Proprioception, the unconscious perception of movement and spatial orientation that comes from stimuli within the body, also aids alignment. Good posture is crucial to all people to ensure that the least strain possible is placed on supporting muscles and ligaments during any kind of movement. If strain is placed on muscles due to inefficient posture, the body must use more energy, and it quickly becomes fatigued. The spine has four natural curves and three regions.
The curves in the spine help it to withstand great amounts of stress by evenly distributing it throughout the body. The first region of the spine is the cervical spine, which is the uppermost part of the spine in the neck. It consists of seven vertebrae. The first two vertebrae are specialized allowing the neck to move. The first vertebra, known as the atlas, is placed between the skull and the rest of the spine. The second vertebra, or the axis, has a bony projection called the odontoid process. This projection fits within a hole in the atlas and allows the neck to rotate
The first curve of the spine is located at the top of the cervical spine. This curve, called the cervical lordotic curve, bends inward resembling a the next twelve vertebrae make up the thoracic spine. This region of the spine is in the chest section of the body, with the ribs attaching to these vertebrae. The second curve, the thoracic kyphosis, is in this region, and it bends outward resembling a backward. The third region of the spine is the lumbar spine located in the lower back area of the body. It is made up of only five vertebrae, but these are the largest vertebrae of the spine. The lumbar spine, which connects the thoracic spine and the pelvis, takes the bulk of the body’s weight. The third curve is in this region of the spine, and it is called the lumbar lord tic curve because of its inward bend. The large bone below the lumbar spine is the sacrum, which consists of several vertebrae that fuse together during development in the womb. The sacrum forms the base of the spine and the back of the pelvis. The sacral kyphosis is the backward curve at the end of the spine.
Pain
The majority of the peoples experiences joint pain, and non-contact joint pain is likely an outcome of poor posture. Clinically speaking, pain is the number one patient complaint. However, pain still lingers for a majority of people even after seeking out medical care. This is where proper postural dynamics can help alleviate pain. When more musculature is recruited to support the body, it becomes more structurally sound. Aligning your posture in an optimal position eliminates the dysfunctional altered length tension relationships of the core and spine muscles, consequently relieving the pressure placed on your discs which leads to peripheral muscular pain. For example, a rotator cuff problem can be directly attributed to a poorly functioning TVA which causes the thoracic spine dysfunction of kyphosis (rounding of the shoulders). This in turn puts the glend humeral joint in a compromised position.
Breathing
Excessive lordosis and kyphosis will alter length tension relationships within your breathing muscles, which make proper and efficient breathing impossible. When an optimal posture is attained, it becomes evident that the body has built in mechanisms for breathing correctly and efficiently
All organisms on this planet rely on the presence of oxygen for survival. An adequate oxygen intake is at the foundation of good health. If we look at the body in terms of needs, often times you will see many talking about the importance of hydration and nutrition. However, analyzing how well you can live without food and water it pales in comparison of how long you can live without oxygen. Good posture naturally promotes proper.
Stress
It has become increasingly recognized that psychological stress plays a key role increasing the likeliness of acquiring chronic diseases that wreak havoc on the body. This is due to the fact that stress will stimulate the catabolic ‘fight or flight” response that is present within the sympathetic nervous system. Unlike animals that only turn on their stress response during life or death situations, humans are in a constant state of stress, thus unable to return to their homeostatic balance. When a body is continually bombarded with excessive stress, the body begins to neurologically wire in the physiology of ‘break down’
This will then create a dysfunction that inhibits the stimulation of the anabolic systems of your physiology. When you are effectively able to deal with your stressors and return to your homeostatic balance, chances are your livelihood will be immensely enhanced. By implementing good postural habits the body can transmit the stress response equally through all systems, which makes it more resilient to the stressors encountered on a daily basis. It is not the stress itself that will kill us,
but rather our response to the stressor that will. Aligning your posture will ensure that you will be able to physically cope with your external reality.
Digestion
Digestion itself is at the foundation of the majority of nutritional deficiencies. When discussing treatment of nutritional deficiencies, discussing diet and hormones is all too common. However. digestion is an important but often overlooked factor as well If you eat the most nutrient dense food and your both’ is not able to assimilate the nutrients into its bodily functions, it will give no positive effect. Structurally speaking, poor posture will limit how well you will be able to assimilate nutrients from the food you consume.
The digestive tract needs to have optimal alignment in order for stool to be passed through. Since most people have a posture that is out of alignment, it becomes difficult for the body to work around these dysfunctions. Utilizing effective posture building techniques helps align the spinal structures, which in turn assist the alignment of the digestive structures to promote optimal digestion. Since stress also affects digestion, it becomes clear how dysfunctional posture universally affects multiple problems the both’ encounters. When we are in a constant state of stress, our parasympathetic nervous system is suppressed, therefore shutting down our digestive system and sending blood flow and energy to the muscular systems. If a human was to eat the most biologically compatible food for its specific metabolism, and immediately after a Lion was introduced into the environment. If the human knew of the dangers of the Lion, the stress response would inhibit the functional capability to digest the food and assimilate the nutrition. This underlines the effects of any type of stress upon the human body. If the body is more adaptable to stress via good posture, it will automatically regulate the stress response efficiently, which enables better digestive tract function.
STABLE FAT LEVELS
Attaining a stable body fat is one of the reasons people seek out fitness professionals. The problem with most fitness professionals approach is that they fail to get at the loot of the dysfunction. When body fat increases, it is primarily a symptom of a structurally and physiologically inefficient body. An inefficient body, body does not operate in regards to prioritizing the reduction of both’ fat. It is possible that training very hard and dieting will yield results that most people are looking for in then training regimens. The question is whether or not they can sustain it. For the people who still have issues with decreasing body fat, it is important to note the body’s relationship with excessive amounts of fat is purely a result of a neurological deficiency communicating that the increased levels of fat are normal. Body fat was never a priority in nature for millions of years. There is no reason why it would be now. Following the traditional calories in vs calories out approach fails to adhere to this evolutionary light. Having a structurally sound posture and nervous system will get at the root at dealing with the symptoms of excessive both’ fat increases through the implementation of efficiency.
ENERGY
Most people will use energy supplements and drinks in an attempt to increase then- productivity throughout the day. The problem with this approach is that we are attempting to treat the symptoms rather than address the issue of why we are feeling tired in the first place. Essentially, we address a neurological deficiency as a physiological deficiency. The problem with this logic is that the brain does not have a physiological response first. Before the pituitary gland can be stimulated, the brain must go through a neurological through process first. A structurally optimal posture leads to an optimal nervous system where the brain can wire in an appropriate circadian rhythm clock which releases hormones that give you energy and hoimones that make you sleep at appropriate times.
Energy is a measure of how well a person is operating within a balanced circadian rhythm Your circadian rhythm is a biological base point for balanced energy levels.