Balance

When your balance system is working well, you will be able to see clearly, move well, identify your orientation in relation to gravity, determine your direction and speed of movement and make postural adjustments to maintain your position and stability in various conditions and activities.

As you learned in Yoga with Melissa 354, your balance relies on your vision, your proprioception and your vestibular system. Your body takes in these signals from your vision, proprioception and vestibular system through nerve impulses through special nerve endings called sensory receptors and sends signals to your brain.

Through repetition of these sensory receptors to our brain stems and then their resultant path back out through our body, you form a new neural pathway called facilitation. With this synaptic reorganization you are able to come into balance during your activities. This kind of synaptic reorganization occurs throughout your live as you adjust to changing motion environs. The more repetition, the easier it becomes for your sensory receptors to travel their pathways to your brain and back through your body. The neural pathways become more easy to travel. This is great news because balance is something that we can practice and become better at with repetition.

Your ability or inability to balance is the result of three systems:

* Your vestibular system

* Your proprioceptive system

* Your visual system

Your Vestibular System

Your Vestibular System is your inner ear. Your inner ear sense information about motion, equilibrium and spatial orientation. This information is collected in your inner ear by the utricle, saccule and three semicircular canals.

Your utricle and saccule detect gravity, that is information in a linear orientation, as well as linear movement. Your semicircular canals detect rotational movement.

When you look up and down at the ground and the sky and you are stimulating your utricle and saccule to detect gravity, that is information in a linear orientation as well as linear movement. When you turn your head side to side and you are stimulating your semicircular canals, this is allowing your vestibular system to detect rotational movement. These simple movement patterns will stimulate your vestibular system and help to improve your balance.

As we age, we engage our vestibular system less and less. We mostly keep our body in an upright position. Gone are the days that we jump up and down on trampolines, do cartwheels, hang upside down on monkey bars, or do somersaults. All these movements focus on inversions, rapid changes in directions and enhance our vestibular systems.

Your Proprioceptive System

Proprioception is defined as the unconscious perception of movement and spatial orientation arising from stimuli within the body itself. We receive proprioceptive input from our skin, muscles, joints and sensory receptors that are sensitive to movement and pressure in our connective tissue.

Proprioception is sensed by your entire nervous system. Inside each muscle and joint, you have tiny meters called muscle spindles and golgi tendons that are constantly measuring the amount of tension and degree of contraction that are happening. This information travels up your spinal cord through your spinocerebellar tract and makes its way to your cerebellum. Your cerebellum accepts information from your skin, muscles and joints throughout your whole body and calculates where your body should be in space.

We challenge our proprioceptive system all the time as yogis. When we take our socks and shoes off and practice in our bare foot, we experience maximum input through our feet from the ground. As we move around in different yoga postures our nervous system and brain responds to this propriocept...