A question you may have asked yourself at one time or another;
Your Brain is locked away in a dark city in your skull. Its only feedback about the world around you comes from a variety of sensors on the end of nerves, these include your eyes for assessing your horizon and spatial orientation, Vestibular system (think spirit level) to help figure out which direction your body is moving/ how centre of mass is changing, and mechanoreceptors that detect pressure on feet, joint location and angle and tissue tension… to name a few.
Amongst its many jobs, your brain has to try and orientate your bones and joints so that you stand upright and resist gravity and move efficiently- it has to do this by listening to the combined opinions of all of the above sensors and forming an opinion about where everything should be. It also does this unconsciously so its no good trying to consciously change your posture as that only works for exactly as long as your remember/ are focussed on it for.
Now if you have ever been into someone else’s home and notice that their pictures are all wonky you’ll know that some of us can’t tell with our eyes what level is- probably because the information from them is not all that accurate and your brains having to guesstimate. A problem with any one of the above sensors and you could have some wonky posture!
The eyes are very important to posture and performance and effects all of our muscular chains. Its information is always being compared and contrasted with our vestibular system particularly (spirit level). Any discrepancies in our ability to move our eyes, or visual skills (not just whats measured by an optometrist) will result in some sort of compensation.
Check your eyes simply today with just one of our many tests
Set up your phone to video your effort or have a friend/ partner watch both eyes. Bring a pencil towards the bridge of your nose keeping both eyes on the pencil tip.
Bring the pencil in until it touches your nose. The result should be that you look like the top picture and can still see 1 pencil tip clearly… however a lot of you will look like the bottom picture….which will have some significant body wide effects including less than ideal hand eye coordination but more importantly for our topic altered biomechanics and posture.
You have an inbuilt spirit level that helps your brain figure out your direction of movement, centre of mass for balance and stabilises images like a camcorders image stabilisers- moving the lens in the opposite direction to the movement to keep the lens on the desired target.
Its very common for people to have minor to severe vestibular system deficits from head and neck traumas, inner ear infections etc These can manifest in a variety of symptoms including dizziness, poor balance, motion sickness and less clear vision when moving.
This again affects your biomechanics and posture as well as balance and how clear your vision is.
Download a Snellen chart onto your phone or tablet by clicking here. Once you have done this then sit far enough away from it that its a challenge to see the 20/20 vision line. Fix your eyes on a letter that your can just see clearly see on the 20/20 line. Now turn your head to the left keeping eyes on the letter – does it become less clear?
Next try to the right. Up and down. Did any of these effect your visual clarity?
Then you likely have a vestibular deficit that needs to be trained and calibrated.
Our pressure sensors in our feet and joint mechanoreceptors help us establish how our weight is distributed and where our bones and muscles are orientated. So if these sensors are not stimulated or don’t send accurate information back to the brain then the above will be effected.
This one isn’t one that you can accurately test yourself at home but you can get some idea by looking at 2 things- what does your foot print on the beach look like?
Anything away from the normal will effect you posture and performance at some level.
Now set up to scales side by side and stand with one foot on each – is your weight evenly distributed ?
Again if either is out then this will effect posture and performance.
If you are having issues with your posture or what to have an in-depth analysis conducted, use the contact form below to get in touch with Oliver directly:
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