#17 - The Neural Hierarchy Pt 3: The Proprioceptive System

[Music] Welcome back to the Cruisal-Eat Podcast and then the house with Tony. Tony, what's up, man? In your house, well, I'm in my house. Yes. [Laughs] Exactly. How's it going? It's going well, man. I've been experimenting a lot with drum recording. So I got this drum kit and the bass man. I'm not a drummer, but, man, it's so much fun. I bet that is. It's something that I'm taking to not in an aptitude way, but in an enthusiasm way. It wasn't expecting. It's just so immediate. That's cool. Yeah. That's kind of been my obsession as of late. As a music enthusiast kind of guy, do you just put aside time to actually play in practice and do all that? Yeah. Yeah. And I wish I did more. I mean, in my ideal world, I would practice three instruments in a day. And that would be great. But life has its demands and responsibilities. So the idea is having the stuff here and ready to go. The guitar should be out and looking at you. Yes. When you have an idle moment, you just grab it. There's no resistance. Yeah. That's my end. Yeah. Man, I feel like I could have got into music at one point in my life. There's so many musicians in my family. Interesting. And my uncle is like a really awesome drummer. And I remember growing up and really digging the drums and going over to a friend's house and beating on him and playing around and even learning a couple things here and there. But it's so weird. For me, I'm so, I get so hyper focused on like one or two hobbies that I just ended up going a different direction. And I think it's like there's so many things in my life that I have a little bit of interest in and I have friends who are like, man, you should do this. And I'm always like, I'm sorry, I can't because I have to fly fish. I have to tie flies. I have to do Jiu Jitsu and like those kind of hobbies that sit at the forefront are just always taking my my time and my thinking. But music, man, that that could have been. I mean, that could have gone that way. Yeah, I'm I'm such a generalist in some ways. I I dabble in so many things and I kind of wish sometimes that I just put the blinders on and because that's that's how you achieve. Yeah, you know, a high level of performance is you really do. Right. Really do have to focus on one thing. So the grass is always greener is what I'm saying. Yeah. Oh, man, I just thought of something totally random that I wanted to tell you. I've been meaning to tell you this and it actually has relevance to today's conversation. I'm proprioception. And you know, being a sound guy like what do you call yourself actually like if somebody was like, what do you do? What do you say? Yeah, like the title that I've settled on is I'm an audio engineer and producer. Gotcha. So that's called audio engineers like the technical and like yeah, people with colloquially local me sound sound guys sound and sound person. Yeah, but yeah, that's like very much speaking to the technical side of it. And then the producer role is more like the creative input and the vision and looking at a project holistically and executing. Yeah, yeah, nice audio engineer. I think it so listen to this man I was thinking of you yesterday actually because this came up in a live call inside our our membership with with our community. One of the folks in our community basically she's I mean she's been all in she's done basically everything she's super dedicated to our strength programs and our mobility programs and she's even done. And she's also a pro dojo and which is you know where we teach more of the in depth neuroscience stuff that that we like to use and combine with movement. And she had been struggling with a movement dysfunction if you want to call it that really what she was calling it was a muscle imbalance. And she said her how much she trained her glutes the right side never seemed to get stronger and she never seemed to have good awareness of it. And so anytime she was doing like glute focused exercises be it a squat or a lunge or a hip thrust or anything like that. She felt such a deficit side to side. And you know she had tried all the traditional things whatever people say to do you know focus on that side only do more strengthening of the right side you know in terms of the glute musculature. You know foam rolls stretch you know whatever she had done the whole list. And nothing really ever stuck for her so fast forward into going through our neuro dojo program. And learning about what's called cranial nerves and actually just we focused in on the brain stem because the brain stem is an area of the brain that is largely involved in setting the tone of our muscles kind of calibrating the tone so like the resting tone and. We learned inside the course how to apply cranial nerve activations which are different things that you can do that stimulate nerves and those particular nerves insert into the brain stem. And the way the brain stem is divided. Different portions of the brain stem have a connection to facilitating greater muscle facilitation with different basically is broken down into flexors and extensors of the body. So the glutes are a big extensor muscle for the hip. So we had gone through some cranial nerve activations and she started using sound stimulus this is why I was thinking of you. She started using sound stimulus in her right ear because that's a cranial nerve eight activation so the vestibular coccular nerve is activated when you listen to music or any kind of sound. And so by stimulating her right cranial nerve eight she got unbelievable drive to her right glute muscle. And so yeah, yeah, this is really cool to because I was so proud of her because she's not a movement professional. She's a software designer so super intelligent in the way that she's thinking really is the way you need to think when it comes to applied neurology. But she decided to use that because we assessed it and it was good for her. She decided to use that for I think it's been like maybe four or five weeks of her putting sound stimulus in her right ear when she practices the exercises that are difficult for her like the hip thrusts the squats the different kinds of glute bridges. And she said the difference is incredible because now she feels both glutes symmetrically and she feels like she has a massive amount of strength that she didn't have before. So yesterday on the live call we were revisiting this and talking about it because she had a question about like how long do I have to do this. She has already done it for five six weeks and now she says she's at the point where she no longer needs the stimulus to help her with the glute function because she's done enough work that included the volume the frequency the intensity the repetition. And so we talked about them like hey, this is awesome like you actually created neuroplasticity by using a cranial nerve and addressing a muscle imbalance at the brain level. And so now proprioceptively she's in a better place with strength than before. So she actually cleared up this muscle imbalance and I think that she's going to be I told her like you probably might have to revisit it at some point if it feels like it's not fully sticking but given that you've done five or six weeks of this already you're probably in a good place. So I thought of you because I was like man wait till Tony hears that you could use sound stimulus like effectively to target muscle imbalance pretty cool. Man, that is yeah, yeah. I mean it makes sense within the framework that we've been discussing but every time you bring in this like new novel stimulus like it's completely different sensory system. It's hearing it's not even one of the ones we've been talking about it totally weird. Yeah. That's really cool. It's fun. It's really fun to you know witness people kind of learning that information and then and then going and trying it and sticking to the process and getting some cool results. So would this be a I guess we can dive in here right with this be like if it's wired together at fires together kind of strategy. Yeah, it would it would basically you're you're looking at pathways and you're looking at structures in you know at the brain level and because the way the brain stem is divided up and where those nerves insert it really has to do with where does the nerve insert like we know that the vestibular nerve inserts into an area called the ponds and the ponds is an area area of the brain stem that helps to facilitate muscles in of the extensor group. So you could potentially do the same thing for a hamstring or you know like another form another extensor muscle as well. So yeah, it is like that because we're activating we're activating a nerve. that we know inserts into the home of where we can affect extensor muscles globally in the body. That's awesome. So to kind of zoom back out a little bit, we've been talking about the neural hierarchy. We've talked about the visual system and the vestibular system. And so today to wrap this up, we're going to deep dive into the proprioceptive system. You got it. You got it. And this is, you know, as we've kind of laid out already, the visual system sits at the top of the hierarchy. The reason it sits there is because from what we understand, our brain is depending on input from the visual system, more than any other system in terms of understanding the outside world. So that's why it's sitting up there at the top. And I think that as we keep kind of unpacking the vestibular system and learning more and more about it, we're, I mean, we already are really starting to see that it is potentially as important as the visual system. But it is kind of second in line in terms of how we, we structure this to teach people. And then sitting at the bottom is the proprioceptive system. So don't let that fool you. That's important for me to say that the proprioceptive system is equally as important as the vision and vestibular systems. But based on sensory input, the amount of sensory input that our brain is kind of most interested in in understanding the world, it's sitting there in third place, right at the bottom of this hierarchy. So I do think that the proprioceptive system is the one that is probably most relatable for people at first. And a lot of people probably have even heard the words proprioception before because maybe you had an experience with a coach or a physical therapist that may have used that language. But I want to talk about what it is and I even have kind of a physical example that, you know, people can, can work through to understand what that sense is. We'll get to that in just a minute. And, you know, hopefully we'll get to a point where we can talk about how to train it, you know, and why is it even important because it is massively important. So let's start with what is it, right? What is what is the proprioceptive system and very simply it's a sense that we use to understand where our body is in space. Okay, so that's really, really important. We take this for granted, but we have to know where our limbs are in space at all times. We have to know where our head is in space at all times. We have to know where our trunk is all the time. And we take it for granted because it's not something that we make conscious decisions about, right? It's not like, all right, I'm going to make sure that I know where my right arm is. It doesn't really work like that. We have so much neurology working for us to help us understand where our body is in space. And the proprioceptive sense is one of the most important senses that we have for doing that. So here's a physical example of what the proprioceptive system is doing for us and actually have a couple of them. So, and listeners, you know, you guys can try this as you're listening here. You can be seated to do this. You can be standing to do this. I'm going to have you close your eyes. So if you close your eyes and you just let your arms go down by your sides and you stick your thumbs out like your hitchhikers thumb. You're going to stick them out and kind of quickly you're going to raise one arm up, right, keeping it straight. And you're going to stop it at about eye level. Your eyes are closed so you don't know exactly where it is. And then very quickly you're going to raise the other one up and you're going to stop it in line with the other thumb. And then once you've done that, you can open your eyes and see if you're accurate. And so if you were accurate, Tony's doing this right now. He has a little bit of a deficit. It's not terrible. So what Tony found is like, was it your left side that was a little higher? Uh-huh. That's right. Yeah, yeah. So that's what I'm getting at is one side might be a little higher than the other. Maybe, you know, you overshot or you're undershot with the other side. And what we did there is we removed visual information so you couldn't rely on the visual system to understand where your limbs were. And what I saw there with you Tony's like I'm pretty used to seeing that when people do this with me on live calls and stuff. Like sometimes there's a little bit of a deficit like you think you were accurate, but you open your eyes and you're like, what the heck? I'm not. I've seen like people miss by like six inches. Oh wow. And that I would say is a lot. You could do the same thing. Having someone close their eyes and then very quickly touch the tip of their nose. Right. Your proprioceptive sense is allowing you to understand where your body is in space. When your visual system can't help you. Right. But it's also this sense is also working for us when your eyes are open and you're moving to the world. But this is an example to help people understand what this sense can do for us because when we close our eyes and we do, you know, the lifting the arms test. You're relying on your proprioceptive system to try to create accuracy with that assessment. Okay. And there's tons of little things we do like that when we're testing a person's proprioceptive system. There's stuff we can do for the lower body. The arms. Sometimes I'll have people do different like bending motions with their trunk. And we're trying to see side to side. Is there a difference in how they're perceiving how they're moving on one side of the body or the other and often times we find out that yes, there is a difference. And what we ultimately call that is a mapping problem that's a proprioceptive mapping problem. And so when you find those little deficits, they're important to fix right they're important to train so that you can you can improve map clarity. So quick question on that. Yeah. In the last episode we talked about the vestibular system. And you know, everything's intertwined right so you can't really treat anything in a silo. True. But is it possible that doing that thumbs up test. If there's a deficit with the vestibular system be a place to look because maybe your balance is affecting how you're mentally mapping where. To lose or what? Yeah. What level is. Yeah. Here you go again Tony you're thinking is always is always good for this stuff. Yeah. So. Another higher order system can be driving a problem and that's that's important to understand so you could test somebody's proprioceptive system you could find some deficits. And it doesn't mean that it is only a proprioceptive problem because other higher order systems definitely could be interfering with your performance. And the vestibular system is actually a good example because if you have a vestibular deficit and balance is a very big threat. Then just standing on two legs and balancing right and maintaining good posture against gravity or even while you're moving. If that is threatening that could absolutely throw off proprioception but also understand that your proprioceptive sense might be kind of calibrating in a sense to your visual and vestibular systems because your brain is always going to prioritize the information that's coming in through your eyes in your inner ear. So it's interesting to think how if our brain is prioritizing those systems how we might have proprioceptive deficits as a result of issues there too. So that that is a great example of how these these three systems of the neuro hierarchy really do play off one another. And you can't always assume that the problem is just in one of them. Definitely have to look at others too. Cool. Okay, so let's keep talking here about what proprioception is and how it works. Those of you for our listeners who have heard about the proprioceptive system before we're learning a lot about it still. And I think that early on there's been some assumptions with the proprioceptive system. And early on we used to think about it as a very local event. So let's say you are in PT because you sprained your ankle and you know you're you're there because you're you need to improve proprioception of your ankle because you've had an injury. For a long time we thought about proprioception as a very local event as if proprioception is happening in the joint itself like let's say in the ankle joint if you've if you're rehabbing an old ankle sprain. And that's not really entirely true. We don't look at it that way anymore. So proprioception is not so much a local event. It's a central event. So proprioception actually lives in your brain. So the receptors that sense different forms of movement right different kinds of movement those are. what live at the joint level. So we have nerve endings. That's what I mean when I say receptors. We have nerve endings that live in our tissues. They live in the tendons, they live in the ligaments, they live in our muscles, we're talking about receptors even at the skin level. And there's lots of different receptors. They sense different kind of stimuli. The ones that were really interested in in this conversation are the types of receptors that are often referred to as mechanoreceptors. They sense different kinds of mechanical information while we move. So when you go to, let's say, do a lunge or a squat and your body is moving, your joints are moving, your muscles are contracting, you have receptors or sensors that are going to be able to sense the amount of stretch or tension on your muscles. They're going to be able to sense the amount of torsion that's happening or twisting forces that's happening on tendons and ligaments and just really on the joint structure as a whole. So these receptors are receiving that information. Okay, these mechanoreceptors and that information is then traveling a peripheral nerve all the way to the spinal cord. That information hits the spinal cord, continues its journey up to the brain. And proprioception actually lives in the brain. And what I mean by that is maps. You actually have maps in your brain for your body. And so what I meant when I said that proprioception is more central than it is local is that proprioception itself is not in our joints and tissues. It actually lives in the brain. And that's because we have maps in our brain. Our brain literally has a three-dimensional map, right? Lots of maps actually if you want to go into the weeds with it. But we look at when I'm teaching about proprioception, I just talk about it as one map, similar to like a GPS. And so our brain has this running map that's going all the time. And it's a GPS map of the body. And every little landmark on that map, right? You know, you can look at it as it's representing a little part of your body. And the idea is your brain wants to have the clearest proprioceptive map possible, right? So that it can understand where you are in space, right? Going back to that little test we did at the beginning, right? If you lifted one thumb and then lifted the other and they weren't even, right? That is a blurry spot on the proprioceptive map. And so your brain's not cool with that. Like your brain doesn't want to have any blurry spots on this map. It wants it to be as clear as possible. It wants it to be as accurate as possible because it's looking for trustworthy information. And so this map is running all the time and your brain is checking in with this map to understand your body. And there are lots of reasons why we might have blurry spots on this map. Sometimes it has to do with a lack of training, right? Maybe you haven't had a lot of novel movement experiences in your life. You didn't grow up as an athlete. That's one reason. And maybe somebody else has been sedentary for too long. So it's more of a disused issue. Really common one is we can have old injuries, right? Old injuries can create blurry spots on the map through having areas of pain-sensitive areas, areas that have expressed pain for a long time, scar tissue. Maybe people have had surgeries and their left with scars and those scars have even become areas on their body where they don't feel things accurately or appropriately right? These are all really common reasons why we could have blurry spots on this map. And guess what blurry spots do on the map? They drive up threat. So going back to kind of our threat neuromatrix talking about the threat bucket. And so when I think about proprioception, I think about it like this. You know, we're trying to clarify your body's proprioceptive map and we can do that through good training. And there are ways that we can train that are better than other ways, right? In terms of clarifying this map. But this is this is how I want people to think about proprioception because you think about your own injury history, that old sprained ankle or that old shoulder, you know, injury that's caused you some chronic pain. Maybe you have a scar left over from an old surgery. Maybe you're just somebody that hasn't had those experiences, those novel movement experiences. Might be time to start clarifying your proprioceptive map. And that could go a real long way in helping you improve your performance and decrease pain as well. What would be an example of a blurry spot on the map driving up threat? A really common one is an old surgical scar. So an old surgical scar could drive up threat because it creates that blurry spot on the map. The reason that's a blurry spot is because scarring and also realize that before I even make it just about a surgical scar, any old injury could leave you with scarring. Right. So, but I usually talk about surgical scars because it's much easier for people to kind of relate to and picture a scar. If you have a scar, it means that some of those receptors in the receptor bed have been damaged. And that can leave you with different symptoms. You can not feel things as accurately. Sometimes people say that, you know, oh, I had that old surgery and my knees never been the same sense. It actually is very sensitive to clothing, right? When I, you know, my pants brush against it gives me a weird, you know, ebgb feeling. I get I hear stuff like that all the time. Sometimes people will say it almost feels like numb or tingling. Sometimes you have areas near a scar that have become hypersensitive. So you feel things like too much while other areas near it lose the sensitivity. And so this is just a really common example of something that could cause that blurry spot on the map and drive up threat levels because your brain cannot see that body part as clearly as it wants to. So is it that the threat level, the base level of threat is just always up because this map is constantly seeking feedback, right? Like it's firing down, it's coming back. It's constantly saying, where are you? Where are you? And yes, it's not getting that. Exactly. It's not necessarily movement related or exercise related is what I'm asking. The threat threat specifically. Okay. Yes, correct. So the threat specifically, the threat levels could be driven up just because you're like you were saying that that map is constantly running. This is all the body all the time is what we say about proprioception and it's a good slogan. Yeah, yeah, it is. And so constantly running and if your brain can't see that body area well, also realize that when we're talking about things like scarring, there's usually a movement consequence to that. Like you move differently. A lot of the reason you move differently is just because you're not feeling things the same. So your proprioceptive sense is just it's just off. And yeah, that's driving up threat levels and it's constant, but you know, it depends on it depends on the person, you know, how healthy are they? How healthy are the rest of their sensory systems? Listen, human beings are incredible at compensating. That's what we do. And so, you know, it's not that you're not supposed to have injuries and scars and blurry spots on the map. We do. Like it's not there's no, I've not met anybody that doesn't have something, right? And so, we're amazing compensators and that's really what we do as humans. It's a talent, right? And you're a great compensator until you can't compensate anymore. And that's often when things just kind of get tipped, you know, tipped over the threat bucket spills out. That's important to understand. And so our sensory systems and thinking about like this neuro hierarchy, we're always expressing some level of what I would call sensory substitution where one system might be trying to pick up the slack for another one. So you have one underperforming system, another one might be trying to help it out. Here's an example of that. You could have a lot of proprioceptive deficits and maybe from old injuries. And maybe that has created a movement consequence where, you know, you're just not moving well anymore. Like let's think about somebody who has had problems with their feet. If you can't feel the ground well because of sensory issues in your feet, that's going to make moving through the world very threatening. And as a result of that, your brain might use other sensory systems to try to help you move through the world more so than maybe it would if those foot issues weren't existing. One of the things I've seen in people is I've seen their visual system actually become overactive. And it's interesting when you see that because they're usually folks who also tell you that they suffer from anxiety. And sometimes the reason for that is because their visual system has become the main sense that they're using what's being overused in this scenario. And their peripheral vision, what we're able to see without looking at something, that's what I mean with peripheral vision. It's become over active. And so you're kind of hyper aware of it. Your brain is trying to use your visual system in a way that now is disturbing to you because everything is distracting you and you're periphery. And I've seen this with people before where they really begin to rely a lot on their peripheral vision more so than they want to. And that's just because of this idea of sensory substitution. If one system is really underperforming, your brain will try to compensate in some way by kind of upregulating, turning up another system. I'm imagining, you know, our ancestors in a jungle hunting or something. And they're on high alert. And so their peripheral vision is super activated. And it's a useful state in that context, right? But yeah, maybe it's not something you should have running 24/7. Totally. That's exactly that's a great way to explain it. It's a useful state for sport performance. Right? Being able to see what you're not actually looking at. That's an amazing skill. But as you're saying, there is a time and place for it. And we need things to kind of downregulate when it's appropriate. Right? And if that's not downregulating and it's kind of staying overactive, then that can bring up some challenges. With our appropriate receptive system, you're absolutely right. It is something that I was first exposed to reading about training and strength exercises and that kind of thing. Right. You gave us a great example early on of someone that just couldn't just couldn't connect with their left loop, for example. Right. Or, you know, one of the challenges that I've seen a lot in myself, but also in other people is in performing like a squat and like being able to maintain kind of an upright posture as they're as they're getting into the whole. Maybe that's not appropriate, receptive issue. Maybe that's a mobility issue. Well, it could be and they could be the same thing. And that's actually that's what's interesting is that looking at position like at the bottom of a squat, you could have a faulty position because you're you are experiencing appropriate receptive deficit. Yes, it also could be the visual system. It could be the vestibular system driving those two because those things are highly involved in how we maintain our posture. So, you know, when we say mobility problem, mobility problems actually fit into the proprioceptive category. Because yeah, this is actually a good thing to mention. You see, I throw around the word mobility a lot. And I think that people mistake mobility for only range of motion. If you know what I mean? Like, what you know, to be mobile is to be able to express good range of motion and, you know, mobility and flexibility kind of overlap. When I am talking about mobility, I am talking about range of motion, but I'm also talking about motor control. And motor control is just a fancy way to describe coordination. So that's just an important distinction to make. And yeah, you could be at the bottom of the squat, kind of having a difficult time maintaining a certain posture. And it could be the proprioceptive system that's driving that. And so then the question is like, how do we give you the missing input? Like, what part of your body do we have to train proprioceptively to help you create better position in that squat? And honestly, the fitness industry is doing this. Like, out of everything that we've discussed in terms of the neural hierarchy, the proprioceptive system is essentially what the fitness and rehab and just movement worlds are designed around. We know about proprioception. And there's a lot of great things out there that methodologies and exercises and just any kind of movement that we can use to train it. Right. So it is the more relatable one. But there are ways that we can get into about what types of training would be more proprioceptively dominant and better for enhancing proprioception. Yeah, that would be really interesting because the things that I'm thinking of are cues like, you know, track your knees out when you're when you're at the bottom of the squat or I guess you gave me this cue in the visual system episode where you were like look down when you're doing an overhead press. And that was extremely helpful. And I know that there's a visual reason for that. But there's also potentially proprioceptive reason for that, right? And just like how your posture is supporting your shoulder as you're pressing. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, because we can't separate. We really can't separate the systems with movement. They're all working together to create that overhead press as as interesting as that maybe to think about like, yeah, your vestibular system is helping you make that press. So is your visual system? And then of course, your proprioceptive system is a big part of that. Wow. So yeah, why don't you run us through some examples that might be helpful and figuring out how to target your proprioceptive system specifically? Yeah, sounds good. So this is cool for me to talk about and build a case for because what I'm about to talk about is joint mobility exercises. And to me, joint mobility exercises are really the foundation of the whole philosophy that I teach. And it's about proprioception. And without understanding how to move your joints, right, it's difficult to then integrate more global movement, like it's harder to make larger, more complicated movements if you don't have control of all the little fine parts of your body. So with joint mobility, what I'm talking about is moving a joint through its fullest range of motion with control. Okay, and so that's control meaning motor control. And here's the interesting thing about how this ties in the proprioception. You see all those all those receptors that we talked about early on, the ones that sense all the mechanical stimuli that's happening when we move. The greatest concentration of those nerve endings is actually in our joints. The areas of the body that have the most in this case we'll just call them proprio receptors are these joint areas. That's where they live. Okay, so already in knowing that it builds a case for why moving your joints through a full range of motion would be a really healthy thing to do to build your proprioception. But here's the other thing. More so there's two things actually. Areas of the body that have the highest concentration of joints would be areas that have the greatest potential for developing enhanced proprioception. So if you think about our body and where we have the most joints, it makes you think about your feet. It makes you think about your hands. Yep. It makes you think about the spine. It makes you think about, well actually makes me think about this is the overlooked one. Your your skull. Your skull because there's tons of joints actually in the skull. We don't really look at them as joints because they're they're called sutures. But like if you look at a skull you see these lines on the skull. If you're looking at an anatomical image, you see these lines and that's those are cranial bones where they're connecting. And there's actually a lot of joint structures in the face. We have these sutures in the face and you consider the jaws part of the cranium. And guess what? Think about all your teeth. Right? All of a sudden it's like, oh yeah, so the cranium has a lot of joint structures and a lot of potential for proprioception too. So think about this. If the skull, the hands, the spine and the feet have the greatest potential for developing proprioception because that's where the most joints live in our body. And we know that the most proprioceptors live in those joints. It's kind of funny because guess what the fitness industry is based around? The opposite. The fitness industry is based on your shoulders. It's based on your chest muscles. It's based on your six pack abs. It's based on your biceps. And it's completely different. So when I'm doing mobility work with people and inside our programs, we teach you how to move every single joint in your body because that's where the greatest potential is to developing these movement skills that come from enhancing proprioception. So we move our feet in a lot of different ways. Taking the foot through full ranges of motion, mobilizing it in special ways. Same thing with the hands. Same thing with the spine. The spine is a big one. Being the midline of the body. It's super important. Being able to move your spine is just critically important for so many reasons. And we also have interestingly enough mobility drills that we teach people for their cranium. Moving your jaw. We actually have what's called cranial mobility drills that I teach in our specialized course, the neurodojo where we have ways to mobilize these sutures in your skull as well as even including proprioceptive activation with teeth, which is really interesting, like pressing on a tooth while performing a mobilization for a cranial suture. Yeah, like weird stuff that actually can be used very effectively in pain management. So are you saying that you can move your cranial sutures? So what you're doing, so the cranial sutures, it's more about creating mechanical tension on the connective tissues that actually innovate the sutures. Okay, so there's actually connective tissue layers of the skull called meninges. And you can perform certain positions, like if you've ever seen, I know you've seen me teach like nerve glide before, like on Instagram where you take a peripheral nerve and you create a certain shape of your body, a sequence of movements to put the nerve under tension and then once the peripheral nerve is under tension, we move a joint that the nerve crosses and we call that a nerve glide. And so what you're doing is mobilizing the nerve once it's under tension. The cranial mobility drills work in a similar way where you're positioning your head and neck and jaw and sometimes even your eyes in a certain sequence of movements. And then while you hold that position, you do interesting little things that mobilize the connective tissues around those sutures. Sometimes it's moving your jaw, sometimes it's moving your eyes, sometimes it's moving your tongue, sometimes it's moving your neck. Like those are the drivers similar to how we would use a shoulder or a hip to drive a nerve glide for either an upper or lower body nerve glide. So interesting to think about that because no one thinks about going to the gym and doing cranial mobility day, or spine day or foot day or hand day. They're just really ignored body parts. Right. And so with our mobility programs, that's what we're doing. We're teaching people how to move every single joint in their body because we know that's where the greatest potential for proprioceptionist. And then, you know, fundamentally, we know that proprioception is super important for learning how to move through the world more confidently and better because of those clear proprioceptive maps that we're after. So by learning to move your joints through full ranges of motion with control, you're essentially clarifying your brain's proprioceptive map. So if you have an old injury, maybe it's a shoulder injury and now you're going through the mobility work. As you're doing that, every single time you perform a repetition, you are now providing your brain potentially some of the missing stimulus, the missing sense. And then that map is recalibrating. And the cool thing about the proprioceptive map is the map is always changing. And when you change one area of the map, the whole map changes. That's how we look at it. So let's say you have really poor control of your feet and you start mobilizing your feet and going through all the drills that we teach people. As you're mobilizing your feet and improving your the local map for your feet, the rest of the map is reforming around that. And this is kind of a cool educational opportunity that I always take inside our free challenges and stuff when we do our mobility challenges with people because this is where people start to really learn how the whole body is connected and how you can move one area and get a very global result with another. An example of that would be we just did a we just wrapped up a free mobility challenge for the shoulders. And at one point, I was showing them how doing some work with your hips can improve your proprioceptive map of your shoulders or vice versa. So it's kind of that idea of changing one area of the map changes the whole map. So I had a sort of a tangential question. When you were talking about the there's the most proprioceptors in areas where there's the most joints. So the example that really works for me is my hand because I see a million little joints in there and I have finer motor control of my different fingers. Right. But then it occurred to me like none of those joints will maybe the thumb but like the shoulder and the hip work differently than like the elbow for example or the middle knuckle of my index finger where it's kind of just like a open and close. These joints have like not 360 degree but have like circular range. Yes. And I was curious how does that affect like your spatial awareness or your proprioception, right? Are those joints mapped more densely than your elbow joint? For example, because there's more planes of motion they can move through. Right. That's a great question. I don't know if I have my own opinion. The reason it's my own opinion is because I don't know if I've ever learned that you know the elbow joint is going to have like this percentage less of proprioceptors or mechanoreceptors compared to the shoulder. Right. But here's it makes me think of this and I think that this is really cool to bring up and it is going to answer in part what you're asking. And for our listeners you guys can literally google this image but this is so interesting. There is a spin around in the neuroscience world for a long time. It's called the humunculus. And the humunculus or the humunculi little people, if you google this you'll know what I'm talking about. If you google humunculus what you're going to get is a very funny depiction of a person. And this image is going to have a giant head. It's going to have giant feet. It's going to have enormous hands. It's going to have huge lips, big nose, big eyes. Right. Just the facial features in general are going to be really pronounced. And the rest of the body is going to be rather small in comparison to those things. The thoracic spine or like the spinal area will actually be relatively large. But what you'll notice is that the shoulders and the elbows and the wrists and the ankles and the knees and the hips are just these little itty bitty you know parts of the image relative to everything else. And we have there's an image for like when you google this up you can look at the sensory humunculus and you can look at the motor humunculus. And both of them are very similar. There's not a huge difference between them. But what this is what this is showing us is how our brain is really looking at our body in terms of proprioception. How it's understanding our body. And it's based on the amount of real estate that is taken up in our brain dedicated to these exact body parts. So if you think about that from a survival standpoint your hands are a huge survival tool. Right. They really make us human to be able to do the things that we need to do. Find a motor for survival your hands are huge. Right. Literally. And in this humunculus they're enormous. And that's because your hands take up a massive amount of proprioceptive real estate in your brain. Just look at the feet same thing. Takes up massive amount of proprioceptive real estate in the brain. The face. Right. We communicate with our face. We take in food water. Right. With that area of our body there's there's so many survival reasons why we could say the head and the face and our eyes right our visual system. Right. Thinking about that. That's why the humunculus have big eyes. These are all the things that are super important for our survival, super important for our health. And going back to your original question, which was a great question, like how do we look at things in terms of like comparing proprioception from the shoulder to the elbow? Well, if you look at this, neither one of them are nearly as important, proprioceptively as those other body parts. And so that's what your question made me think of. - Yeah. So this is what's very interesting if you are trying to improve your health, solve mobility issues or decrease pain. These areas that take up the most real estate in our brain are also body areas that are enormously important or create very high potential for decreasing pain and improving movement. And so that means that by moving your feet or moving your hands or moving your spine or doing something sensory-based or motor-based with your face even, you can change movement output very drastically and even decrease pain. I've had really cool experiences with that. Just to give an example that is gonna be like a weird one 'cause those are the fun ones. I cannot at this point tell you how many people I have helped resolve neck pain by doing exercises with their tongue. It's just like, and people are like, I've tried everything. And I'm like, okay, give me the list. Well, I've done this and I've done, I saw this therapist in that, they're like, okay, well, did you ever exercise your tongue? They're like, of course not. And that is, there's a lot of reasons why tongue work like could actually, there's lots of neurologic reasons why that could help with pain. I mean, back pain, neck pain are the big ones that I see at help, but kind of keeping in line with this conversation and the homunculi representation. The tongue is really big on the homunculus, right? And so it takes up a lot of real estate in the brain. And that is an example of moving an area of the body that is very appropriately rich. And when you do that, whether it's the tongue or the hands, the spine or the feet, there's a great potential for increasing performance and decreasing pain, even if it doesn't seem very directly connected in terms of the proprioception conversation, it is connected. - Yeah, I mean, that's sort of the great takeaway from all of these episodes combined is just how things that seemingly are not connected tend to be. - Right. It's true. And it's just the reason why I love neuroscience so much is because like all the weird stuff that we sometimes see there can be some really clear rationale for why it could work. And it seems like it's not connected. Circling back slightly just 'cause I don't want to forget to mention it in terms of training application because I really want listeners to be able to think about proprioception in a new way, right, in terms of map clarity. And then any resourceful person is gonna say, well, okay, I want to start clarifying my proprioceptive maps and Taylor talked about moving joints. So we want to circle back to that a little bit. So obviously we have incredible joint mobility programs that can support people in that process, but also realize that other forms of training are proprioceptively good forms of training as well. Like any kind of strength training, you're still training your proprioceptive system. It's just that the highest potential for that is going to be found at end range of motion because that's where the most mechanical reception is activated. So moving through full ranges of motion and doing it in a novel way, such as I like to do with our joint mobility drills where we are creating circular movements. A lot of the joint mobilizations require you to make half circles, full circles, even figure eights. And the reason for that is that that complexity of movement at end range of motion is really, really good for enhancing proprioception. And the last thing that I wanted to say about that is that when you do that against resistance, now you have a really great tool for it. And actually we just are currently putting the finishing touches on our band loaded joint mobility program. And so what we did originally is we had a body weight joint mobility program where you learn how to move all the joints in your body just as is, no resistance. Just kind of learning how to manage your body in space, moving the joints through a full range to express good motor control. Our follow up program now is with resistance bands. And so every single joint mobilization is having you, anchor a band to either something external or doing some kind of self anchored setup where now you're doing the joint mobilizations against the resistance of the band. And it is awesome because now the band is giving you feedback as you move. It's making it more challenging because it's trying to take you out of position as you're moving. And you have to really just focus and learn how to express really good motor control against the resistance that the band is providing, which also develops a very unique kind of strength, which is, it's a really, really unique kind of strength moving your joints through full ranges against bands. And we even changed the position a little bit because that matters with enhancing proprioception. The last training variable that I wanted to mention for increasing proprioception that is critically important and almost completely ignored is changing the speed at which you move. If you go back to originally, we were talking about those receptors, some of those receptors, their role is sensing different stimuli that's related to speed. And so if you only exercise at one speed and you're never varying the speed, then you're not getting full potential out of your proprioceptive training. And so like what we do programming wise is we'll actually program exercises at slow medium and fast speeds. And the reason is we're trying to clarify your map and we know that the proprioceptive map has a map for slow speed. And we know you have a map for medium speed and we know you have a map for fast speed. And we know that you have a whole proprioceptive map for different positions. And so when it comes down to our movement philosophy and particularly the joint mobility, we wanna be able to move our joints through a full range of motion under control. We need to be able to do that in different positions under load, hence like the bands, and then eventually at different speeds. And if you can do all of those things and you go through the exposure of all of those things, now you have an extremely good and hopefully clear proprioceptive map that your brain can rely on for taking in proprioceptive information. And that will ultimately help you move through the world better and a clear proprioceptive map will be a map that doesn't drive up threat levels. And so just by clarifying that map, you can even experience less pain. - Have you seen like if someone goes through this systematic, I'll call it like a joint targeted physical literacy program. That's kind of what it's like to me. If you have someone go through that, do you see it translate to better movement and athletics or better movement and strength training? Like how specific are these gains versus general? Tony, it is ridiculous. Like this out of everything is the lowest hanging fruit for movement. Like people, I talk a lot about this on like Instagram and stuff when I'm educating, 'cause you know the general population, like it's some days, sorry guys, but some days it sounds like all you understand is stretching. Like people, like people will basically just DM me and be like, "Hey, I've got like excruciating knee pain "in both knees, like what stretches for my quads can I do?" And it's like, well, there's a lot of education to go with this man and what makes you think I would even stretch it. So it's ridiculous when you take a person and they have not had any kind of training experience 'cause most people have not ever moved their joints or learned how to move all the joints in their body. You start to see people move better immediately 'cause they've never had that kind of proprioceptive upgrade. And it transfers into everything, it's amazing. So just mobilizing your joints, it increases neural drive to your muscles. So we use this and I'm talking both like in the moment and long term. So like in the moment with training, we program a lot of joint mobility drills just before we program some of our main strength. strength training drills, because if you mobilize, let's say, your hip at a full range of motion first, then you go and do, I don't know, Bulgarian split squat, you will be stronger. You will have an upgrade in neural drive, your hip will move better, your muscles will move better and express strength better. That's a kind of a short term example. In the long term, we see the same thing. And what's really happening here, if you think about it, I love how you use the word literacy. When we're teaching people how to move their joints, what we're really trying to provide people is the ABCs of movement. And as you're learning to move all the joints in your body, you're learning your ABCs, because it's very fundamental, right? And then eventually with those ABCs, you're turning those things into words. And maybe that's as you're starting to expand that proprioceptive map and you're learning how to do these movements under different loads, you know, in different positions. Those words eventually were able to take and create sentences with. And now maybe you're under different loads in different positions against different types of resistance. And now you're moving at varied speeds. And the literacy just keeps building, right, with the proprioceptive map. It really translates into people's lives. When you learn how to move all your joints and you start developing those ABCs that eventually turn into words, that eventually turn into sentences, your body just knows what to do with that improved proprioception. And so all of a sudden larger, more global movements start becoming more coordinated. And so we see improvements in athletic performance or those whole body movements, because what we're doing is very isolated. We're doing, it takes a great level of isolation and skill in terms of stabilizing the parts of your body that are not moving, but moving the target joint. So that at first may seem unethyletic in a way, because it's so isolated. But because those are the ABCs and then you're building and building and developing them, building out that literacy, eventually you get to the point where you have such a solid proprioceptive map of your joints. You now have been granted more movement options. And you're able to take those options and do the other things that you want to do much easier and make all those little, I don't know, call them micro adjustments, right, integrating those ABCs into movement that is more complicated and more global. And so the difference is unbelievable. And that's why I think about training the proprioceptive system in this fashion as very fundamental and kind of a huge foundation of our program. Yeah. To circle back to your client that was using auditory stimulus in one year to wake up with their sleepy glute, right? Yeah. Obviously that was a different stimulus, but if you do these kind of joint targeted drills, is that something that potentially then that person, if they had, for example, a glute that they couldn't activate, is that something that now all of a sudden, if you were to say activate your left glute, they would now know how to do that. Is that the kind of tangible difference we're seeing? It can be, right? So if the problem is driven mostly by the proprioceptive system, then simply enhancing your proprioceptive ability could literally fix that. And eventually in putting in the right amount of work, the decision to make the movement that you were describing that becomes reflexive. So you would no longer have to think about it, right? It's just eventually it kind of becomes a reflexive thing. But we can't always guarantee that it's the proprioceptive system driving the problem. And that's why so many people are on the search for help when it comes to improving different limitations or managing pain is because remember the rehab, the fitness and the movement world altogether is based around the proprioceptive sense. But how many people are still looking for help with their pain issues? And that's just because maybe they're not doing the right proprioceptive work. That's always a consideration, but it also could be because other systems are driving the problem. So actually quick story. I was thinking of an athlete I worked with. This is probably six or seven years ago. He was an endurance athlete, young guy, real talented. It's kind of funny how he found me. Actually it's more than seven years ago. I think it stands out to me in my mind because when this particular athlete contacted me, it was like Mr. Miyagi in the karate kid. It was really funny. So like this kid, because that's what he was, he was like messaging me like repetitively. Like almost it was like getting annoying. He's like messaging me and he's like, he's like, dude, I need to work with you. I've got this problem, this knee problem and I know you can help. And I was like, get in these messages and I'm like, man, who is this guy? He's messaging me a lot. I really don't like at the time I was not equipped to really give him anything like or move him in the right direction because we weren't in a place with our online business. Like we weren't in a place at all where we even had much of an online business at that time. It was still mostly like seeing people one on one. You know, yeah, we are on social media and stuff and I was doing occasional YouTube videos. But like we didn't have what we have now, what we can direct people even for free. So I didn't have anything to really give him. So I'm like talking to this guy and he's like, listen, I need to work with you. I know you can help me and you was just like super adamant about making this happen. And I'm like, hey, listen, like I don't know how I would help you. Like what do you suggest? Like you live, he's across the country and he's like, well, here's how we're going to do it, man. He's like, I'm going to work with you and we'll just share a Google document and you can tell me what to do and I'll do everything you say and I'll just do absolutely everything. So I was like, okay, let me talk to my wife about this. And I was like, hey, Alicia, what do you think about like, you know, and this is where we started to think about like online clients now? We had no idea. Like I mean, in my mind, I couldn't work with anybody online because it's like, well, I won't be there with them. So like how am I supposed to use my skills and my tools? So I'm like, how can I help this kid? And so kind of fast forward to getting to work with him. And yes, we shared that Google document and that's how it started. And I was like, well, listen, man, if you're going to work with me, like I have to get you on a Zoom call at the very least, like X amount of times because I have a lot to tell you that if you don't know these fundamentals in terms of our education, like we're not going to get anything accomplished. So we see he bought in and we started working together and I would see him on calls and stuff occasionally. And we started the process, right? Where do you think I started? I started with the threat bucket because he wanted my help in dealing with knee pain. And he was currently training as an endurance athlete and he happened to be in Europe at the time. And he was sideline because his knee was bothering him so much he could not train and it was just he was in a very anxious state with his training because, you know, the competitive season was approaching. So I started going through the toolbox and working with him one-on-one online and giving him homework exercises to do on his own. And I was at a point in my career where my study was going very deep into neurology and I kind of was, you know how you probably relate to this. You get hyper focused on certain things when you're learning them. It's almost like, in your very interested by how complex the information is and it's almost like you want it to be that problem. It's like, oh, well, I want his knee to be a vestibular problem because I'm learning so much about the vestibular system right now. I bet I can help him with this. This is cool information. Or I want it to be a vision issue because like, I've got all these amazing tools for helping people with vision issues. And it's like, I felt like I was at a place where I wanted it to be something more difficult than it was. And so I went through some of those tools and he applied them in there were some results and we started dealing with the pain rather quickly, but we never, we never got it to go away right away. Like it's like, it was still there, still preventing him. He could not train the way he wanted to. So I just like at one point, I was like, all right, I got to take a huge step back and think about this. And so I sort of circle back, started thinking more fundamentally and I was like, proprioceptive maps. Does this dude know how to move his joints because he's putting a lot of force through his body as a trail runner? Right? This guy know how to move his joints appropriately. I started going through all the joints and teaching him how to do this each one. And we get to his knees or doing knee drills and they're helping, but they're not solving it. And all of a sudden I'm like, oh, I skipped something and I shouldn't have. We did not go over tibial rotation when we did his knee mobility work. And he was telling me that his pain was only happening in what's called in over open chain position. So if you can imagine being in a running stride, the leg that is not the leg that's producing force into the ground, but the other leg that's up off the ground makes it an open chain position. So just like standing on one leg and he was only feeling pain in an open chain position. And that was a massive finding that tipped me off for some different ideas. So when the leg was in the air, his knee hurt, when it was on the ground, it did not just thing. And in if there's movement professionals out there that do work with helping people with pain and mobility, by the way, this is a massive tip because oftentimes when you're dealing with stubborn pain issues, you will find if you test that the pain is only happening when it's either open chain or closed chain. And that is a very important proprioceptive finding going back to those receptors. So we started doing open chain mobility work for his knee, specifically working on tibial rotation. And we teach a drill called tibial rotations. In fact, they're called hanging tibial rotations so that you can work on your motor control in the open chain position. And this is your, this is like your shin rotating. Like everybody sort of looks at the knee as like a flexion and extension hinge joint, right. But the knee, the knee has rotational abilities. They're just not the same rotational abilities that you would see in like a hip or a shoulder. But you've got your shin, right. It's called tibial rotation that needs to be able to you need to be able to rotate right to for a number of different reasons. Anyway, we hit the hanging tibial rotations. We started doing that mobility drill and immediately started assessing well for him. And I remember getting off the call and being like, oh, I think that's going to be good for him. And then like within 24 hours, he was messaging me being like, dude, the pain's gone. Let's roll. And and there was a really big moment for me in my, in my career, we're trying to help people because I had to stop and make sure that. Well, I basically was going too far into the weeds too soon. And I had to circle back and think more fundamentally and bring it back to the proprioceptive system. And realized that this was a really healthy person in front of me. And the issue didn't seem to be driven by other higher order systems. We just had to increase his map clarity. Right for this particular part of his body because for whatever reason, it was driving up threat levels and causing pain. And so once he dealt with that, he was good to go and he went on to do really, really well. We worked together for a while actually and he did really well. That's amazing. That is so cool. It's got to feel really good when you have that breakthrough. For sure. Yeah, for sure for them and me as the coach. Yeah, you know, it's it's a great feeling realistically. It isn't always fast. Right because you got to clean up a lot of noise. There's a lot of interference and sometimes people's different, different things can get in the way. But sometimes it is fast. And the cool thing about the neural hierarchy, understanding it better and understanding these systems is that you can become more targeted with your approach and know why you're doing what you're doing. And that in itself and being able to assess and reassess to see how you're responding in the moment. That is so empowering for the coach and and the trainee being engaged in that process and experiencing those differences as you assess and reassess things. Yeah, that's awesome. Should we wrap it there? Do you have any any other things you really wanted to hit on this episode? I think that's just flew by. It does. Yeah, it's flying. I think that's great. And I want people to start clarifying the proprioceptive map. You know, start thinking about it in the way that we that we went over it and look, if you haven't, if you haven't yet started investigating joint mobility. And you're a fitness enthusiast or you're somebody that is interested in improving your health and your performance or you have, you know, nagging pain issues or you just want to be a healthy person. You've got to start learning about this because it's it's a total game changer. Most people with their exercise programs are very linear. And it's problematic in the long run. There's a lot left on the table when you're training in a very linear way. And this is just a great way to start to enhance proprioception that will lead to so many good things, including just improving your health and decreasing pain. Yeah, awesome. All right, Tony. That's it. Thank you for being here and thank you to our listeners. If you want to learn more, please follow the podcast. Check out the JoJo and come along to 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. [Music]