#15 - The Neural Hierarchy Pt 1: The Visual System

(upbeat music) - Welcome back to the Cruiser Elite podcast. Tony's in the house with me again. Tony, how are you? - Hey, I'm doing well. It's gonna ask you, how's it going? - Ah, it's good, actually, some exciting news is my knee has definitely improved. - Nice. - A lot over the past couple of months. I think I had to do some honest reflection about how it's going and what I was doing. - Yeah, and I think I just wasn't doing enough in terms of loading it and exercising and just actually working on getting stronger as opposed to just trying to think about it as rehab. - Right. - So I think that was kind of a breakthrough for me. It's a lot better. It still feels weird and will hurt a little. And I was discussing with my PT and she was like, well, if the ligaments has scar tissue, it's not exactly what it was before. It might always just be a little bit looser than it was. And so you're just gonna have to always kind of tighten and strengthen the musculature around it. - Yep. - The exciting part is, I think in the near future, I'll be getting back to starting my jujitsu. - That was my next question. So I'm a little bit nervous about that just 'cause I feel really stupid if I walk in and then on day one, for a week one, something happens again. - Right, right. Well, I mean, you sort of learned a valuable lesson at the beginning though. And as far as like, well, I can tell you from experience that the most challenging aspect of jujitsu when you don't have a background in wrestling or other forms of martial arts or grappling is the stand-up portion. And so, I mean, once you get involved in it and you get on the ground and maybe you can even dodge some of the stand-up stuff like at first, just to kind of play it safe. I think you'll be good. - Yeah. - Yeah, but that's a hard transition to make, isn't it? From like, what is rehab to when is it okay for me to start training and loading this knee more aggressively? - Yeah. - I feel like that's the biggest challenge with that process. - I'd be curious how you think about that because for me personally, there was a lot of fear around it. And it was like every time I loaded that knee probably to like, you know, 110 degrees approaching 90, I would get shooting pain. It felt like it wanted to pop out the side. Like, it was my body telling me like, hey, stop it. And so it was really hard for me to get past that kind of fear of like, hey, if I push it too hard, it might, you know, something bad might happen. 'Cause that's how it felt. - Right. - But I think part of what I thought the PTO's working with was really great was she was providing movements that I was able to strengthen in those ranges of motions without the threat. And she didn't frame it thusly, but, sure. - You know, I think I just had to build confidence over time. And as time passed, the pain was lessening also. So that's great. That's great. I think you're on your way out. When you get a little further into that training process and you're loading it more, if you're still having pain, I'll give you some tips on what you can do for ligaments. Because sometimes after joint injuries, when ligaments have been, you know, stressed or partially torn or whatever the case might be, ligaments are one of the most no-susceptively active tissues in the body, which means that they have the most sensors for danger and threat. - Hmm. - For obvious reason, because your body wants to know, your nervous system has to have a really good protective mechanism in place to be able to measure when bones and joints are being pulled apart essentially, right? Makes sense, doesn't it? - Nice design. And so after an injury when a ligament is involved, ligaments can actually stay no-susceptively active and those no-susceptors are the threat receptors. And so what can happen is even after tissue damage has been completely healed. Later on, you can still feel pain or discomfort in the ligament area. And sometimes you have to go and do some more focused work on the ligament itself. And it's actually not that difficult. The most challenging part of it first, like somebody who doesn't have an anatomy background or a lot of anatomy knowledge is actually finding the location. But honestly, I've had people do it over Zoom calls. You basically press on the ligament with something like the end of a Sharpie marker. And you create pressure directly on the ligament. It is a little uncomfortable, but then you move at the same time. So you might be doing knee circles through a range of motion that's very comfortable and you're not pushing your limits while you're providing the pressure on the ligament. And it can be awesome. Like literally can essentially turn off. If you wanna think about it that way, turn off the no-susception. So when you get to that point, we'll throw some ideas your way. Maybe they'll be helping you. - Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, it's just been a happy coincidence of life that I was going through this. Just as I met you and started getting into what you're teaching people. And so it's been really cool to think about it in those terms. And it's helped me understand what I've been going through. So I appreciate that. - That's great. Oh man, my pleasure. I'm happy it's helping you out. All right, so shall we get into the good stuff? - Yeah, you were talking about no-susceptors. And I felt like that. - Yeah, that's easy. - That's relevant to the topic. - Yeah, it's relevant. It's relevant. So today, today we're gonna be talking about what I commonly refer to as the neural hierarchy. And so these are the three most important systems that you can train, whether we're talking about, you know, just general training, sport performance training, even rehab and pain management. These are the three systems that are most important. And so we wanted to talk about each one of those systems today, break it down and get into it a little bit deeper. - Awesome, awesome. So and I think we touched on the neural hierarchy briefly in a previous episode. But yeah, it's a good place to start. It's just give us the big picture overview. - Yeah, yeah, sounds good. So this neural hierarchy is made up of three different systems. The first one is the visual system. So literally, we're talking your eyeballs. And the visual system sits at the top of the hierarchy. Okay, so we're actually saying it is potentially the most important in the hierarchy, sitting at the top, below that we have the vestibular system. And the vestibular system is referencing your onboard balance system. So we're talking about your inner ear and how it helps us stabilize and balance. And then the third system is the proprioceptive system, which we've talked about a bit too in previous episodes. The proprioceptive system is more about moving and understanding where your limbs are as you're moving. So these are the three systems that I'm educating about all the time. They're the three that seem to be the most important when it comes to any form of training or rehab. And you wanna make sure that you're actually addressing each of the systems. And when you're struggling with an athletic performance goal or a pain management goal or mobility goal and you're trying to get some kind of results, you have to be aware that all three of these systems feed into that goal. And what generally happens in the movement, fitness rehab industry is that we become much too focused on the proprioceptive system, even though that is an incredibly important one. Pretty much the entire movement in fitness industry is based around that one. And the visual system and the vestibular system is essentially completely left out. And there's some issues that come up when you think about that because of the percentage of sensory information that our brain gets through these different systems. So to give you an idea, sitting at the top there, the visual system, depending on what you read, essentially what you'll find out is that 70% or more of incoming sensory information from the world is coming in through our eyes. So that means that most of how we move, right? Most of that is coming from our ability to sense our environment through our eyes. So when you consider that, it's like, all right, we'll have 70% or more, some people say it's up to like, like 90% is this based on just like brain activity or like yeah, it's cells that are dedicated to that. Yeah, so it's just all sensory information that we get from our external environment that's helping us move. Most of it's coming through the visual system. So when you consider that, it starts to kind of sound kind of funny in your mind as you're thinking about it that if 70% or more of sensory information is coming in through our eyes, why don't we ever do anything for them? Why don't we exercise our eyes? Why don't we work on our visual system? If most of the movement equation comes down to our brain nervous system and body relying on visual information, the most. At the bottom of that hierarchy, which still important, don't get me wrong, is the proprioceptive system. The proprioceptive system is the system that helps us understand where our body is in space like our limbs. That's the one that's trained the most through whatever form of movement training you can think of. It's all proprioceptive activation. The question that comes to my mind is like when you're saying this is a hierarchy and the visual system is at the top of the hierarchy and the proprioceptive system is at the bottom, does that mean that I'm not lifting a barbell with my eyes, right? Right. So when you're performing, let's say it's a movement or a sport or whatever, why do you say that the visual system is the most important? Is it just because you're getting the most sensory information or because it is essential in executing that performance in a way that people don't realize? I guess that's one way to ask this question. That's fantastic. It's a both. That's really good. And I like how you were saying you're like, well, you don't lift a barbell with your eyes. So how is your visual system going to help you with that? And interestingly enough, your visual system does help you with that. So we'll talk about both of these examples. In terms of movement, let's think about it as like more athletic performance. We don't realize this because we take it for granted. Our visual system is a very reflexive system. You know, reflexive means that you don't have to consciously think about it for it to do its job. It just we have built-in reflexes that do that for us. For example, you don't have to say, okay, eyes go right. Okay, eyes go left. Go look at the bird that's flying by. It just happens, right? Through a variety of reflexes. There's so many different things that go into our vision. But we think about this very basically with like athletic performance. We don't realize this. But things like the speed of our eye movements or the quality of how our eyes track something. Maybe that's a ball or an opponent, a player on the field, whatever the case. Our depth perception, right? Our understanding of where is that object in space? All of these things, and there's more, all of these things come together and our brain has to process this input all the time. And as an athlete or really with whatever we're doing with movement, all of that sensory information has to be accurate for us to be able to execute a movement well. And I'll give you an example because I've struggled with different visual deficits throughout my life. Mainly, I really think about how this affected me early on in school, but also as an athlete, when I was just starting with sports like youth athletics and then also up into high school, I had for sure different visual deficits. I was given glasses at a really early age, so my visual acuity was not very good. What I didn't know is that I had eye muscle imbalances, so you can actually have imbalances with the way that your eye muscles work. So just like maybe people are familiar with having a muscle imbalance in your legs, maybe your quads are stronger than your hamstrings, right? We hear stuff like that all the time. Well, we have literally muscles that move our eyeballs and you can develop imbalances in those muscles. And when you develop those imbalances, it can drastically alter the way that you perceive the world. And one of the examples is you might think that something that's out in front of you is closer than it really is, right? Or you might think that it's further away than it really is. And even if it's subtle, it's still going to alter the way that you do something. And so early on when I was becoming more educated on this applied neurology stuff and having my visual system assessed, I learned that I had some different deficits, and it all made sense to me when I started to think about my history as an athlete. So basically, what I learned is that I was perceiving things as being slightly closer than they really were. And I also had a coordination issue between both of my eyes, so they weren't coordinated together very well, particularly on tasks that, well, we call them convergence tasks. And what that is is your ability for your eyes to move together to look at something that's rather close to you. So imagine unfortunately, looking at your smartphone all day long, your eyes are pulled you of muscles that pull your eyes together to coordinate that skill of convergence so that you can look at whatever's in front of you. And what was happening with me is one of my eyes, I think it was my right eye at the time, did not want to do that as easily as my left eye. And so it would fatigue out and it would cause me a lot of visual fatigue. And I eventually developed an issue that is called suppression. And it's a mild suppression issue, but what that means is that eventually my brain goes, all right, this task is starting to stress the visual system. I think rather than trying to get this right eye to do its job better, we're just going to kind of take it offline and do everything with our left eye. And over time, if you do that over and over and over again, it starts to develop more deficits and you know, lots of different visual issues. Well, the thing that I think about most when I consider my history with this is actually two things. One, I hated school and it started early on in the classroom when I basically couldn't see the almost said chalkboard. I think it was a chalkboard. It's probably not a chalkboard anymore. Fazed out chalkboards. Yeah, I think I'm starting to get on the older side. I couldn't literally see what was happening at the front of the room that well. And so isn't that a good excuse to just no longer pay attention because I just couldn't really understand what was happening. And I think that's where it all started for me from, you know, the in the idea of not really enjoying school and it being very difficult is it started to feed into some differences that I had with being able to learn things. And when I think about my athletic career, I loved the game of lacrosse and I played, I started very early with lacrosse and I played, you know, youth years and up and through high school. And I loved lacrosse but I hated it at the same time because when I was on the field, it always felt like a very stressful math problem to me. Right. Kind of the strategy, if you will, that needed to happen on the field. And I had stick skills and I had physicality and I could run around the field well and I could do all that stuff. But I always was very stressed out because the idea of throwing in catching never went the way that I expected it to go. Some days I was on and then other days I was off. And I also remember making mistakes that were super surprising to me, whether it was catching the ball, throwing the ball. And it started to cause a ton of stress for me. And we were a very good high school team, always competing for a state championship and the stress would build and build and build in that alone would start to kind of deteriorate the quality of my performance. So what did I do? I quit lacrosse after my junior year decided I wasn't going to play lacrosse anymore. Too stressful. Didn't know why at the time. And actually the year before that as a junior, I took up wrestling. Wrestling was a different thing for me. I didn't need to be stressed anymore about my visual system not working for me and I got to use my best system. proprioception. I got to grab hold of people. I got to hold on to them. Right? I didn't have to worry about balls flying at me or catching and throwing or understanding where 10 other people were on the field. Everything was happening right in front of me and I got to have contact with the person as we were wrestling. Back then I was a big time weightlifter. So it's constantly training that proprioceptive system and wrestling was a lot less stressful for me compared to lacrosse. And when I think back on my history and the decisions I made as a student and an athlete, I literally can see how my deficits with my visual system caused me to make the decisions that I did, which it's pretty fascinating to think about. Yeah. And in the context of a threat, I do wonder, did you find yourself prone to injury in lacrosse? Well, I did have some injuries come to think about it. But well, so this goes a little bit deeper now. And I also did have injuries and wrestling as well. I had some joint injuries. And what I think happened for me is because of my visual deficits, I developed a fairly significant, what we would call hemisphere dominance, where you basically, and in most everybody has some level of hemispheric dominance, meaning one side of your brain is doing most of the work, or at least doing more work than the other side. I mean, you can think about this simply as being, you know, hand dominance, right? Yeah. Yeah. If you're constantly going through life and you're using your right hand and right foot for everything that you do, you're going to develop some level of hemispheric dominance to one side and have some possible deficits on the other side. For me, what I think happened was because we were talking about the visual system and most sensory information is coming through our eyes, I developed some larger hemispheric dominance issues, which essentially meant that my right brain, my right cortex, was no longer doing its job as well as it should have been. And when that happens, that means that my right brain was not acting on my right brain stem like it should have been. And there's actually a lot of consequences to brain stem function when your eyes are not doing their job well. Because you actually have cranial nerves that are inserting into the brain stem. Cranial nerves are nerves, just like we maybe have talked about in other episodes like peripheral nerves. You know, you have nerves that supply those eye muscles that I talked about. And those nerves insert into the brain stem. The brain stem is one of the most important structures when it comes to muscle tone, like balance of muscle tone, right? Having appropriately balanced flexor muscles compared to extensor muscles, it's also highly involved with autonomic function, such as blood pressure, and also pain inhibition. So the ability to literally kind of squash no-susception, right? And decrease the pain that we might be perceiving. Well, if your right brain isn't doing its job well, and your brain stem is not getting the activation that it needs, or something is skewed to some degree through a sensory deficit coming from your eyes, then there's consequences to that. And the consequences for me were differences in posture from one side of my body to the other, because your brain stem is also very much involved in your reflexive posture. And as I said, muscle tone, in a sense that I had differences in my flexor muscles and my extensor muscles that were not ideal. And those differences, you know, cause this function of some kind of some sort in your in your movement. And this led me to a one-sided injury and pain history. I actually had a lot of chronic injury and pain on the right side of my body. And I believe that all of this was really manifesting from problems with my eyes. So all those times that I actually thinking back on it. So I partially tore my MCL in my right knee. Actually, one was probably a bad sprain too, were partially torn. So I think that was maybe twice in college. I also had a really bad ankle sprain on that right side in college. I injured my right thumb in wrestling. I had some chronic elbow pain from wrestling and it was primarily on my right side. So I had lots of right-sided stuff because my right, my right cortex wasn't doing its job well. And it wasn't, now here's the thing, it wasn't my proprioceptive system that was the problem because I was as dedicated as you could be in terms of training. And actually, even at an early age, I was very fortunate to have great coaches and mentors that were helping me learn how to train and lots of things about fitness. And so my training was actually pretty darn good as a high school athlete, pretty well balanced. My proprioceptive system was getting tons of training, but it still wasn't enough and I was still getting injured on the right side of my body. One quick question and then one other question. The quick question is maybe this is one of those myths, but doesn't the left side of your brain control the right side of your body and vice versa or is that? Yeah, no, that's right. So yeah, you're exactly right. So the way that I usually talk about it is, so for example, when you move the right side of your body, if you just close your hand and open your hand, you're doing some kind of coordination task on the right side. That task is going to be in part controlled by your right cerebellum, but your right cerebellum is communicating with your left cortex. So it happens up there. Yes, yes. So you're exactly right in that thinking. So like when we test people's coordination to see if they have any deficits, what we would call a cerebellar deficit, what we're really doing is when we discover that somebody might have lousy coordination with their hand or something on the right side of their body, we're saying, oh, okay, that's a right cerebellar deficit and a left cortical deficit, right? Because a lot of those movement commands are coming from the left cortex. That's where the voluntary movement comes from when you move the right side of your body. And so it's the same idea on the other side of the body. If I move my left hand, that's coming from the left cerebellum and the right cortex. Yeah, very cool. And then the other thing that came to mind is, you know, most people are not ambidextrous, right? Most people are right dominant or left dominant. Are you right handed? I am. I do wonder to try to parse this apart a little bit. You know, how much of those injuries might be related to the fact that you simply reach with your right hand first or step with your right foot first versus that side of your body being compromised. Yeah, yeah, totally. I think that that definitely plays into it. I was certainly and still am right side dominant. And everybody has this dominance. And I'm not saying that it's wrong. It's how we're set up. It's just that when the dominance becomes so great, that's when things could potentially become problematic. And it usually involves other higher order systems being involved too. So, yeah, think about how many more right hand reaches I do or leading with my left foot or something, for whatever I'm doing, reflexively through the day without even thinking about it. And that is also going to feed into some kind of hemispheric dominance. The last thing I actually wanted to mention, Tony, because I liked the way that you asked the original question about the visual system and thinking back to what you said, like, well, you don't lift your, you don't lift the barbell with your eyes. So how could the visual system help you? Well, the visual system is, we have reflexes that allow our eyes to do their job. Different, we have different visual tasks. We have the skill of convergence, which is following something in towards, like, say, your face. We have the skill of divergence, which would be following something out away from you. So imagine, like, tracking and catching a ball, right? Eyes got to be able to track in. Eyes got to be able to track out. We also have like near, far type skills where you have to be able to quickly focus on something in front of you and then jump your eyes to the distance, focus on something far away from you. And we have muscles that are dedicated to helping us change. are change the shape of the lens of our eye to be able to do that to focus on something near versus something far. We have other tasks such as like visual saccades where saccades are basically like rapid eye movements where you're changing your fixation from one thing to another thing. So those are some examples and there are more. But all of these visual tasks are reflexes and these reflexes of our eyes are tied to our body. And so through these reflexes, our muscles are actually getting a lot of information from our brain and our brain is telling our muscles what to do. A really simple way to think about this is, you know, at some point most people have probably maybe been involved in learning an athletic skill and maybe a coach told you to look up because whatever movement you are doing required you to have good posture, good upright posture or maybe you were told to look down to do something because the shape of your body needed to be more flexed in nature. And so by based on where your eyes move and how they move, our muscles are getting commands on what to do. So through those reflexes, our muscle tone is calibrated in a certain way that our brain thinks is going to be best for the movement skill. So technically your eyes could help you lift a barbell because of the reflexes that I'm talking about. If you have really lousy vision and you have poor visual skills, there's going to be a consequence for that potentially in your posture and the amount of force output that you're able to create, which is really odd to think about that could be the case. That's how our neurology is holistically wired. So I'm actually I'm having flashbacks of bench pressing now that we're talking about it. And one of the things, one of the cues I remember I read was to pick a point on the ceiling and stay, stay tracked on that. Uh huh. What I remember it helping me with was not letting the bar change angle over my head or towards my chest, but if I had that fixed point on the ceiling, I would always kind of know where the end range of motion needed to go. Totally. And I was pushing it totally. That's a that's a really nice basic example and I use focal points for people all the time when they're learning exercise for that reason because when we look up, we have built-in reflexes that facilitate extensor tone. So for example, let's think about like the deadlift. If you're about to pick up a bar with weights on it, you don't want to look down the whole time because that's facilitating flexion. You actually at some point want your eyes to jump up to facilitate more extension. So flexion being bending down extension in this context would be you got it. Yeah. Exactly. So so technically, let's say you're deadlifting, but for whatever reason you're staring at the ground the whole time, you're actually putting the brakes on your nervous system. You're actually telling your brain to facilitate flexion and you're needing to work against some of the, you know, brakes that you're putting on versus when you jump your eyes up as you initiate the lift, that's going to help you with more extension and it's going to facilitate what we call more neural drive to those muscles. So it's going to make them work better and more efficiently. This is something I use all the time with basic exercise. I give people different points to gaze stabilize on based on the movements that we're practicing. So for example, again, like thinking about bench press, you can use eye reflexes very strategically based on what part of a movement you want to work on. So let's say with a bench press, you were struggling with getting the right spinal position where you want to kind of get some extension going and get your shoulder blades down and back and stable, looking up would actually help you facilitate more extension through the spine. However, let's say you're somebody struggling with the sticking point on a press and you think that you need more neural drive to the chest muscles. Well, the chest muscles are involved with more flexion and adduction and so we'd actually want to look down or possibly converge on something because that is more reflexively wired to being able to produce force and create mobility with flexor based movement tasks. So it's really interesting how you can use eye position based on what you want to improve with movement. I often will work this into mobility training too. So like when we're doing spinal mobility, when the goal is to flex the spine, I often have people look down because that's going to facilitate more of a flexed posture. And then when we want to work on the extension and coming up and out with the spine, getting taller, that's more extensor based. We would now want to look up. So that's kind of another cool way to approach very simply working with the visual system and it has really high pay off with weight training exercises and also sport performance. Yeah. And, you know, I'm always trying to simplify things in my mind to better understand them. And the takeaway here for me is that, hey, this is an awesome, awesome tip. But one is it's not about where the weight is going. It's about where how the muscles need to. Yeah. Like the pattern. Like the movement pattern. Yeah. For sure. For sure. So when someone tells me to look up or look down, my head tends to go with it. So how much of that post-strial change is due to me, you know, bending my neck and changing the direction of my head versus just my eyes? Like, if I just track my eyes down, does the visual system still give me that same effect? Yeah, it does. But the reason why your head wants to go up is because that's what the circuitry does for us. Right? So it's like you have that tendency to like move the head up when the eyes go up. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that. Unless you're practicing a skill where that's not, that's not an advantage anymore. Like you don't want to be doing that. If you isolate it and just move the eyes to the upper position, you still are going to elicit that reflex. It's a very fast reflex. Right? Not like the reflex is activated and then stays on. It actually dies out very quickly. So it just depends on the skill that you want to practice it with. Like for example, when I'm deadlifting, I always use this. I will initiate the lift and I'll jump my eyes up. But I don't want my head to move up too much because I don't want to overextend in my neck. Right? Because then I'll just kind of be in a faulty posture for the lift. So just getting my eyes to go up and move up as I'm initiating the lift is enough to help give me more neural drive. It's funny because when I forget to do it, I'm like, "Oh shoot, let me do that next set." And then I do it and I'm like, "Wow, it just feels so much more fluid and just easier." Yeah, when they say strength is a skill, this is some of what they're talking about. Yeah, for sure. People's story actually about the visual system and how it can really help people with different pain and movement issues too. And the reason why I wanted to highlight this one is because I was actually pretty recently working with one of our members on a one-on-one call. And the first thing that they said to me when we were kind of mapping out a history of what they were calling a low back, like tightness issue. This guy was calling it a QL issue. We like to blame the QL a lot when our low back hurts just because it's a big old muscle in the low back. There's a lot of anatomy in the area. Is it the QL? I don't know, but that's what he was calling it. And the next thing he said was, "And I've had it for 20 years." And I was like, "20 years." That's a long time, man." And he's like, "Yeah, and I've done stuff for it constantly like the whole time and I can get temporary relief. But I never seem to solve it." And so he's talking about doing Pilates and yoga and different forms of manual therapy and having different manual massage therapists working on it and things always felt better initially. But then the result would go away rather quickly and he wasn't really able to get a long-term result, struggling with this for 20 years. So when someone says that to me, I shift my focus immediately to the higher order systems because what this guy was telling me was, "Hey, Taylor, for 20 years, I trained my proprioceptive system and it gave me some relief, but for some reason it didn't solve it." And so what he's basically saying is, could you please check in with my visual system and my vestibular system, just in case we need to do some work there? So this was on a Zoom call and I started running them through some assessments and I just took them through this like basic assessment battery to kind of figure out like what were his eyes doing? Was there anything to consider? He did wear glasses so I already was like, all right, well let's check it out. And we were doing an exercise called a pencil push up where you basically take a pen or you can even use your finger, start it out in front of you at an arm's length away. And you move your target, which if it's your finger, you're moving your finger in towards the tip of your nose and you're following it with both eyes, both in and then back out. So this is assessing and training the skill of convergence and divergence. And he would follow his target in towards his nose and when he got to about four inches away from his nose, I think it was his left eye, if I remember correctly, would literally just jump off the target. And if you've ever had like a drunk person stare through you, you're like, well, you're not looking at me. I think you might be looking in the distance, but I can't tell like it's a weird stare. That's what his left eye was doing. And his right eye was still participating in the pencil push ups, but his left eye wasn't doing anything. It was really freaky looking. And so we, we trained that a little bit. He couldn't get his, his finger into the tip of his nose either, which really is the standard. Like you should be able to track your target all the way to the tip of your nose without your target splitting into two. And he couldn't really come close to that. So his left eye just wasn't doing its job well. And there's a consequence to that thinking back to that 70% of sensory information coming in through our visual system. There's a big consequence that in terms of the quality of the sensory information that our brain is getting. Well, we did some kind of more corrective versions of the pencil push ups where now we were forcing the left eye to do more work. We were covering his right eye and doing some vision training with, you know, the same thing with pencil push ups. We were doing some slightly different things, making a different shape, really forcing that left eye to do its job. And of course, I gave him some homework exercises to continue to practice that. Because this wouldn't be like something you would do once. And within, I think it was one day he messages me through our platform. And he's like, Taylor, I can't believe it. The QL paid from 20 years has melted away. And it is gone. No where to be found. And I was like, nice. We nailed it. So I've checked in with him and I've worked with him a couple of times since then. And he's still continuing to make a really good progress. He had a couple of instances where the tension kind of crept back in. He did his vision training and he knocked it out again. And so like he's, as he corrects this visual deficit, his muscles are going to be working better, right? And the muscle tone is going to be healthier in terms of the synergy right between his flexors and his extensors. Everything's starting to kind of correct now. And it came from his eyes. It didn't come from his proprioceptive system. And it's always cool when you see something like that. Like I've seen that a lot and it never gets old. It always is surprising to me. So mechanically, is it that maybe it's his QL maybe it's something else, but something in his lower back because of his eye is like tensing up more than it should on a regular basis and over time, it's accumulating fatigue or I'm glad you asked this. I left a little something out that I think you'll find interesting. So it's so number one, we don't really know who is it the QL that's the source of the pain? Well, I guess not. The source of the pain is the brain, right? So because that's where the pain is actually an output of the brain. So I never, I first never get too tied to anatomical terms when somebody says my QL is hurting me, it's causing the pain. Well, maybe, maybe it's that area where there's a more kind of biomechanical issue. I'm open to that, but pain is always going to be a completely separate entity from anything happening biomechanically much of the time. It's not that they're completely unrelated. But remember, this was not a serious issue. He's still functioning as a healthy individual going through life. It's just that he has a pissed off QL area that he would like to fix. So it's interesting like to think about it that way first so that you don't get too hyper focused on we have to attack the site of pain because he had already tried that approach for 20 years. And it wasn't giving him long lasting results, right? Kind of going back to your initial question there. I think what was probably happening because this is what I witness all the time with people when they have visual deficits is that the way that he was holding his posture was altered because of what his eyes were willing to do and not willing to do. So for example, with this particular issue in his eye not wanting to converge, what he was probably doing through his life and as he was just going through his day is his body is reorienting itself posturally based on what his eyes are telling his brain is happening in the world. So the way that this hierarchy that we're talking about works is your brain is prioritizing sensory information from these three systems and it's prioritizing the visual information the most. So it would it would like to have the clearest most accurate visual information as possible. And because it's prioritizing that it is willing to tell your proprioceptive system to change and alter its position based on the sensory input that's coming in through the eyes or the inner ear. The vestibular system is also a super high order system similar to the visual system. So proprioceptively the way that he was holding his body's posture was different most likely because of what his eyes could and couldn't do. And what we often see is that there's changes in the midline like your spine can really change its position based on how your eyes are working. So I think that's probably what's happening with him is that that lower back area is getting more stressed because of a postural change that's actually coming from his eyes. What percentage of people do you think have a visual deficit like that? You know, I don't know what percentage but I can tell you this when I first learned this stuff. I was like, well, this is cool but everybody seems to have reasonably good eyes. You know, versus, you know, except for like, you know, acuity issues like being able to see things clearly. Obviously, we know lots of people wear contact lenses and glasses and stuff. But lots of people don't, right? So at first I was a little unsure and then I started testing people because when I work especially, one-on-one with people and they're coming to me with different movement goals, I'm going to test your visual system because I know how important it is and how most of our sensory information we're getting is coming through the eyes. So I can't ignore it even for something like, hey, can you help me improve my squat depth? And so I started testing people's visual system and was sort of shocked and I still am at how many little deficits you can find even in a healthy individual. I guess I'm the example of that really talking about my history of visual deficits. Yeah. You know, I've been going to an eye doctor my whole life but they weren't ever able to tell me that I had eye muscle imbalances because that doesn't get tested. I was just told that I had acuity problems. Hey, you can't see the board, can you? All right, well try this prescription and oh, there it is. Okay. Now you're seeing clear. Here, take these contact lenses and these glasses and that's great. That's acuity but the function of our eye muscles is much different and a lot of times unless we seek out help with that or the type of eye doctor that actually looks at that stuff too. Most people are never in a situation where they get their visual system assessed like that. So I'm always surprised at what I can find and how I can use that to our advantage when we're trying to help a person become healthier and move better. But I will say too that you don't need visual issues in order for this to be helpful. That's what's so cool. You can actually just activate a person's visual system through various more generalized training drills, and you can get great results, too, whether it's in managing pain, improving mobility, improving strength. That's why we actually work in tons of vision training into our strength OJ program in a more general way. It's really, really useful stuff, and you definitely don't need to have a vision problem for it to be effective. Is there a training effect where if someone were to do this over time, they're just gonna get better at it and maintain that, or is this one of those like instant neurological changes that happens because of the stimulus and necessarily? That's cool, man. It's both. So it depends on how you want to use it. So I can tell you that in the work that I do when I'm doing more one-on-one stuff with people, a lot of the times, I'm actually just using the stimulus to help them with a goal. So pain issues, the visual system can be super useful in reducing threat, and oftentimes we're creating a stimulus to do that, or helping people with a mobility problem. So that's one way of using it, and I do that often. But in the case of like the example I gave of our member that I was doing the pencil pushups with, we used the stimulus to help them in the moment move better, but because he actually has a significant enough visual deficit, he's gonna have to put in the work in the longer term to help correct the way that his eyes are functioning in order to get the best benefit and create a long lasting change. So it depends on how you want to use it, and you can use it both ways, for sure. So I'm gonna propose that we pretty much consider this like a visual system, yeah, part of this, and we do a part two. For sure. In that funny way, we thought we were gonna hit this whole hierarchy, and then I just went off on the visual system. I mean, I have questions, you know, and I think the visual system in particular is the one that, you know, when I see the pencil pushups, I'm like, that's really interesting. I have no idea what we're doing and why. And so, you know, having its own episode, I think, makes sense. Totally, totally. I think that's a good way to go. So on that note, is there anything else about the visual system in particular that we should hit on this episode? You know, I think the piece that I want people to be thinking about, and this will also help kind of prep them for listening to more discussion around the vestibular system, is that when you think about the breakdown of these three neurological systems, we have the visual system, the vestibular system, and the proprioceptive system, what we're really trying to accomplish through training, right, or rehab, whatever it is that we're doing with movement, is better senses so that our brain can see the sensory information as being accurate. Because what happens is, in the case of the visual system, if you have deficits that are great enough, there's a consequence to pay for that, meaning your brain is not receiving the quality input that it wants. And so what you're left with is some form of sensory mismatch, meaning that your brain is no longer sure whether or not it can trust the sensory information that is coming in through these systems. It wants to be able to trust it, it wants to kind of monitor each of these three systems, trust it, and then when it trusts that information, it feels safe. And that's really what we're always trying to do with training is create a sense of safety for our brain and nervous system. And when we do that, we are granted better movement and higher performance with less pain. So be thinking about this to our listeners, how training each one of these three systems is, or the goal of that is to make sure that all of that input that comes in from each of these three systems is as clear as possible. So we're no longer doing squats for our glutes and, you know, in our quads, necessarily with this frame of thinking, right, we're no longer just basing our training on proprioceptive input from weight training or even mobility training. We're starting to think about how these higher order systems feed into the equation to balance out that sensory information because if we can make our brain feel safe, then we can accomplish much more efficient movement in a pain free body. Yeah, that's awesome. I actually have a one bonus question that just came to mind as well. Yeah, shoot. Is there ever an instance where you would want to remove the visual stimulus? And by that, I just mean like close your eyes. Yep. To focus on another system. Yep. Because guess what? This kind of this whole equation works in reverse. So let's say somebody has such great visual deficits that most of the threat that they're dealing with is coming from the fact that their eyes are not working optimally. Sometimes you have to have people close their eyes to remove the greatest threat. And I've had to do that in the past with more sensitive clients with like a more sensitive nervous system. It's one of I guess a really more a more relatable way to think about this would be if you've ever known somebody or maybe you yourself, you've had a concussion and your visual system often will become highly sensitized after a concussion where you basically just want to sit in a dark room all day or close your eyes or some people even wear sunglasses indoors because they're so sensitive to the visual information. When your visual system is feeling that level of threat, there's a lot of consequences to that. One of the things that you might do with that post concussion person is actually remove the visual stimulus altogether so that they can focus on other types of movements and things that they might need. So that can happen kind of on a lesser scale. It doesn't have to be like based on concussions, but I have seen many people in the past who just there's so much threat coming in from their visual system that we have to say, all right, well, let's let's close your eyes. Let's sit you down and let's do some movement work that way. And that can sometimes be a breakthrough for them. I've seen it probably more so with the vestibular system because guess what, when you have a lousy vestibular system, it is a huge threat to your brain to be at more risk for falling in your vestibular systems, the system that helps you balance and stabilize. So I see this more so with vestibular stuff where when people have a vestibular deficit, we often have to give their brain more of a sense of stability and maybe stabilize them in other ways using equipment or changes in position, holding onto things, laying on the ground so that their vestibular system can feel safer about what's happening and then we can maybe make some more progress through working with the proprioceptive system first. So yeah, that's a really, that's a really great question and it's something that you really have to consider when you're working with the individual based on their, their needs in their history. Yeah, a little teaser perhaps for more to come in part two. For sure. All right, there it is. And thank you Tony. For our listeners, if you want to learn more, please follow the podcast, check out the website and the dojo and come along for the ride. I promise you'll learn valuable lessons and build a tool set that will help you keep training pain free for years to come. Thanks again for listening. [BLANK_AUDIO]