Posture and Neurology: The Art of Unconscious Competence

In the latest episode of Stance for Health, Dr. Rodney and Karen Wirth dive deep into the world of posture—its importance and its surprising connection to neurology. 

By exploring the intricacies of unconscious posture competence, they highlight how posture is more than just a physical alignment; it's a dynamic, neurological process involving the motor cortex, sensory cortex, cerebellum, and more. Together, these components craft a foundation for better health, improved coordination, and increased physical capabilities. 

Real-life success stories underscore the transformative power of proper posture, making this episode a must-listen for anyone striving to enhance their health. 

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Transcript

[00:07] Dr. Rodney: Welcome to Stance for Health podcast with Dr. Rodney and Karen Wirth where becoming healthy is not complicated. Control your health by focusing on six areas of life that we teach you so you finally have the energy you have to do what you want instead of being a victim of your age. I have over 20 years experience working as a chiropractor and Karen is an author, speaker and longevity coach. We've seen how a tiny change in your habits today can open up your life to a powerful future. Start today and take your Stance for Health.

[00:48] Karen: Welcome to Stance for Health. We are so excited to do our last podcast of the year here at the Arlington office and we want to talk about something very near and dear to our heart, which is posture.

[01:03] Dr. Rodney: Before we do that, I want to thank all you who did downloads this year, particularly last month we had our record download. We're so grateful for all of you that did that and that you enjoy it and that you've shared it. That we're grateful for all of you that listen, whoever you are, we have people all over the world. I don't know how that happened, but that's just the beauty of the Internet.

[01:24] Karen: Yes it is. And we are excited because it feels like we're going stronger than ever on the things that we're passionate about.

[01:32] Dr. Rodney: Only recently have had a renewal of interest, mainly because of a shout out to my alma mater, Parker University, for NeuroCon and for Heidi Haavik and all these different people that have spoken at these events, at the homecoming and have really renewed our interest in posture and the neurology of posture because it's all interrelated, isn't it?

[01:58] Karen: It certainly is. Posture is basically how you hold your body upright against gravity when you're sitting or sitting or lying down.

[02:06] Dr. Rodney: I'm so glad you said that, because most of us think that posture is an act of your will.

[02:12] Karen: When you talk about good posture, we're talking about what we want to call the unconscious posture that you are habitually going into a good position versus the forced posture that we see sometimes. Because your first visit you will get a posture scan and tell us what happens with those posture scans sometimes.

[02:36] Dr. Rodney: Well, lately I don't know if it's just the way we've told people we're going to check their posture, but we've been seeing a large number of people hyper perform. That's a great way to put it.

[02:47] Karen: Their shoulders come back. They do what would be impossible to maintain.

[02:52] Dr. Rodney: That's what people think good posture is. People can't distinguish between unconscious competent posture and conscious competent posture. What we're talking about when we talk about posture is unconscious competence. In other words, when nobody else is around, what does your posture look like?

[03:11] Karen: And I think that's why it is deteriorating because I will think sometimes as I'm scrolling on my phone I realize, oh goodness, my head is forward, I'm hunched over or I'm on my computer. And so that's what we want to work with you on, things that you can do. This is definitely a deep topic and I am so excited to be able to share with you something that sparked having this particular topic again and it's one of our newer health partners shared a review and we love it when our health partners give reviews, but she said definitely choose stance if you're looking for results and lifestyle changes to support those. What is working for her is that she's looking at adjustments but also lifestyle changes. And she says, “I have had pain for around 10 years in my shoulders and have seen other chiropractors, etc. but I have not had even closely comparative results to what I've experienced at Stance.”

Yay. Love that. Great job, doc.

“Within only a few visits, my pain is significantly less and decreasing each time. But this is the part that brings up the posture. Listen to this. I also have seen major improvements in my daily activity and coordination, especially in pickleball and other athletics. Huge increases in my range of motion and capabilities. Highly, highly recommend.”

[04:40] So that is exciting because she's gotten out of pain, which is what most people associate with chiropractic, but she's getting lifestyle changes.

[04:51] Dr. Rodney: So when you think about posture or neurology, I just thought that it was just define this, What is this? And what's the function of this? What's this pathway? And they really all do tie together in the most amazing way. One of the things that I love about this review isn't so much that she got the result that she did, it's that I think when people think about the menagerie of things that we do here that it's filler somehow. I wonder sometimes if people like, well, I don't want to do all that.

[05:25] Karen: What he's talking about is the neurorehab that I get to do with health partners. And I would agree that some of them are like, I'm too busy for that.

[05:33] Dr. Rodney: It costs something.

[05:34] Karen: Yes.

[05:35] Dr. Rodney: It's not just how much your insurance would pay for it or doesn't it in this case. And some people's mindset is it, what use is this to me? I don't want to pay for it. Here's a woman that came in and did it. She didn't know what it could or couldn't do. She just trusted the process.

[05:54] And this is how her body responded. I'm thinking about pickleball, and she told me something that her review doesn't say. She would go to hit the ball and she would miss it over and over again. And it was embarrassing to her. So she hadn't played in a super long time, but she went this time and she was able to connect with the ball. And she. I mean, it's like she ran the court. And so that was really encouraging to me. It reminded me of some other stories, some other accounts that we've had of people that have come and they just trusted the process.

[06:26] Karen: So let's talk about what I tell people as they start the neurorehab, because what we talk about is the motor cortex, the sensory cortex, the cerebellum, the brain stem, all of that, which,

as I said that quickly, you might have just gone, la, la, la, la, la, la la. In your brain. You turn that off. And that's what often happens when we use neurological terms. But let's talk about how posture is dependent on these different body parts, or brain parts, let's say not body parts, but brain parts.So what happens is you've got a map of motor output, and that's a...

[07:06] Dr. Rodney: Big long name, Just a motor homunculus.

[07:09] Karen: And when you first said homunculus, I'm like, what is that? But it's a map of the motor output. And so voluntary movements of the skeletal muscles and postural stabilization come from corticospinal fibers. Where are those found?

[07:27] Dr. Rodney: And what's beautiful about some of these names is that the prefix will actually tell you where the fibers originate and then where they terminate is the second word. So you're cortical spinal just means they start in the cortex and they end in the spine.

[07:46] Karen: Love it.

[07:47] Dr. Rodney: If the destination is to go from the cortex to the spine, that should tell you something about the power of some of the things that we do right, and vice versa. So there's some spinal cortical fibers that traverse and go different layers in different directions.

[08:04] Karen: So you were talking about how we went to neurocon, and that's what struck me so much from one of the presentations there that talked about when you're out of alignment, that those little spindle cells were not sending the right message. And this makes all kinds of sense now as I look at that.

[08:25] Dr. Rodney: Keep getting this picture in my mind or this Thought comes to mind is, well, let's say that neurology is the cake or is the cookie or is the dish that we love. We’re talking about a bunch of ingredients here. Right? And some ingredients. If you put a little too much in or leave a little. You don't put enough of a given substance in the recipe, it doesn't taste the same. And sometimes it doesn't even function as bread or cookies. Whatever the thing is that you're trying to make as our product, we. What do we want? We want posture. We want it to be effortless, almost, but. 

Karen: And basically unconscious. In other words, the process is all working. Instead of sending wrong messages, it's sending them to the correct place, and the correct place is responding to it.

[09:18] Dr. Rodney: Along with that, the product is better posture. That's what we're aiming for. We're just treating what we find, and everybody gets something a little bit different. Let's. Let's focus on this a little more. It’s not hit or miss. We know that if someone's having hand eye coordination issue or is having problems if they're dominant visually, you can usually tell when you do the eye tests, what happens is hand eye coordination happens. And what you're getting into here with the cortex and the cerebellum is that those go, no pun intended, hand in hand, literally because when your posture's better, you're going to have better coordination, too.

[10:00] Karen: Exactly. Because the messages are going to get to the right place. And so posture stabilization occurs on the same side.

[10:09] Dr. Rodney: Yes.

[10:10] Karen: So the motor cortex is stabilizing my posture as it prepares for the movement on the other side. That just blew me away. When I was looking at this, it kind of like jumped off the page at me.

[10:22] Dr. Rodney: And think of it like this is that we are bipedal. In other words, we have two feet and we have two hands,

[10:30] and we have to be able to coordinate that.

[10:33] When your left arm is forward,

[10:35] your right foot's forward in your gait pattern, and vice versa, your right hand's forward, your left hand, your left foot is forward.

[10:43] Karen: And so it's the cross crawl that we talk about.

[10:45] Dr. Rodney: But that's what's cool about what you just said, is that you have both fibers that cross to the other side, and then in the same cortex, you have coordination on that same side. Did I lose you?] So right goes to left for the motor system, but on that same motor system, you have coordination on that same side.

[11:08] Karen: I love it.

[11:09] Dr. Rodney: I love it for the right side. It's beautiful.

[11:13] Karen: And so that voluntary Skeletal muscle movement is what's going on and that optimal dynamic posture. So I love that word, dynamic posture because we get a picture of people's static posture. And that can be for a small season. You can act like you're in the military, but most people that come into us are not in that position all the time.

[11:44] Dr. Rodney: Oh, that's so good. When I hear you say dynamic posture, I think of back to the ingredients. When you have dynamic posture, what are all the things that are going on in order to keep your body static and like homeo stasis while things are happening around you? Let's say the goal with, since we're talking about dynamic posture is to stand upright without falling over. Going down a trail, stepping off a.

[12:18] Karen: Curb has to happen.

[12:19] Dr. Rodney: You're gathering tons of information from around you and not just from your visual cortex because when you've got too much visual going on, you're looking down, and your body doesn't want to look down.

[12:34] Karen: While you're walking, it wants to be upright. That sensory cortex can sense where that ankle is. And that's why part of what I get to do in the neural rehab is eye exercises,

[12:48] movements in an infinity of your wrist and the opposite ankle. And then you know, all of these different things because basically that's stimulating proprioception. So talk more, a little bit more about proprioception.

[13:02] Dr. Rodney: It's a combination of different things. Proprioception. Think of it like this. What are you perceiving? Have you ever been so close to someone with your eyes closed, but they could tell that you were there? That's one part of it. There's something about proximity, pacinian corpuscles. There's different pressure sensors on your skin. That's one way of perceiving. Another one is how far is that joint in flexion, looking at your elbow, or how far is how far flexed are you? How much extension do you have in your low back? Which direction is your head tilted? All of those different things, how far is your hand? All those things are, are going into that. Proprioception is, is a combination of things like mechanoreception. And a mechanoreception suggests how far that joint is in any given direction. But at the same time, you also have muscles that have a certain tension. There's tendon receptors. And then you talked. And so golgi tendon, organs, corpus. I talked about pacinian corpuscles. That's on the surface of your skin, but inside the muscle you've got those things that determine how. It's almost like a motion detection, how far did that muscle go exactly.

[14:27] Karen: Before I started getting adjusted by you and doing the posture exercises and all that we do here, I would very frequently step and think that the curb was way higher. My ankle was not perceiving, didn't have the sensory cord, the nation of that.

[14:46] Dr. Rodney: So when you say perception, what you're also saying is, in a way, you're grading. Your body's grading, what it thinks it should do and. And what it actually executed. What I mean by graded is when you look at that jug, you think it has a certain amount of water in it, and you go to pick it up and has way less than you thought. Very similar to what you said with, like, stepping off the curb.

[15:14] Karen: Yeah. Now, let's talk about the cerebellum as we close here a little bit. But the cerebellum coordinates movement and posture by comparing actual movement to intended movement.

[15:29] Dr. Rodney: Let's say if the goal is to catch the ball, there's so much going on with that. It's multidimensional in space. It's got velocity, it's got altitude, it's got y axis, x axis, z axis. It's got spin.] And you've got all that to take into consideration. At the same time, we take so much for granted with our nervous system.

[15:54] Karen: I think we do, yeah. Because the cerebellum is working in conjunction with the contralateral, which means the same side motor cortex to coordinate the fine movements.

[16:04] Dr. Rodney: It's no wonder that 85% of all the neurons in your body are to coordinate that.

[16:12] Karen: And it also is an inhibitor that reduces extra or unnecessary motor movement.

[16:17] Dr. Rodney: Yeah, Diseases like Huntington's chorea, you've lost some of that ability. So you have all these uncoordinated motions. That's an example of when this thing goes awry, and it's controlling the timing, rhythm, and synchronization of all of that. So I'm saying, wow, I do not take for granted what my body is able to do.

[16:40] Dr. Rodney: Another case study of what we're talking about here is the guy that came to us probably three or four years ago, maybe now, he was a triathlete. With triathletes, most of the time, they're not coming in complaining about pain. They're complaining about what performance. He noticed that he wasn't doing as well on the bicycle. I think it was between the bicycle and the run. He just wasn't happy with the way those two events were performing. And that's a big part of a triathlon. Two out of three. And so he's like, well, what can you do about my hip? It's not functioning right. I love a challenge like that. So we went to work and he trusted this very same system. And ironically, he didn't just get results in that area. He went and played some game that involved coordination and he said he crushed it. After doing all of what we've done, his body got back to some of this lost function that he took for granted. And he just was stunned at how well he performed in that. So very similar When we have a small goal like getting out of pain, one small area of perception in your body, it's probably in terms of dedication, probably less than 5% of the total fibers in your nervous system dedicated to that.

[18:00] Karen: And that is just such a good point that you make. I will say this for our wonderful health partner that left this particular review is that she doesn't limit doing these exercises and the neural rehab to just when she comes, but is doing it on a daily basis. Her body has become accustomed to it and so now her head is aware of where it is in space and. And she is beginning to function so much better in those areas.

[18:31] And we're just grateful. Like you said, we're barely touching this topic. There's so much more, so much more. Just remember that as you are learning to take your stance for health, it's about more than just a temporary Superman or Wonder Woman stance, which will improve your performance, but also what are you doing unconsciously, subconsciously, so that your body knows where it is in space.

[19:00] Dr. Rodney: I want to share something that's come to mind that might speak to someone out there today. When we're visually dominant, we have a very small space of things to look at.

[19:14] Karen: Most people are glued to the phone.

[19:16] Dr. Rodney: Yeah. Something the size of a phone or a tablet that is such a small area to focus on and you have to really focus on it, don't you? That creates a visually dominant, hyper response in your nervous system. And when visual stimulation gets out of balance with the other two systems that create balance in your posture and movement and coordination, it typically triggers or causes your body to be in a place of fight or flight,

 in a place where it feels like that's threat, because that is the threat or the hyper vigilant way of acting in a normal motion, walking down a trail, walking down the street, sort of fashion.

 And so when we can get your body to relax again to those other two components of normal everyday motion, your body doesn't trigger this fight or flight response and therefore pain might be less of an issue. And your body's not going to try to communicate to you that there's a problem.

[20:18] Karen: I want to talk about this more and I also would like to offer you just five exercises that could improve your posture. You can definitely DM us and say posture exercises and I would be delighted to send you this PDF because this is something that is becoming a real threat to our society. It has to do with our lifestyle. It has to do with the focus and the addiction of our screens. We are excited that we can help you make some changes that will help you to take your stance for health.

[20:59] Dr. Rodney: Thanks for listening today and Happy New Year to you.

Thank you for joining us at Stance for Health podcast where getting healthy and staying that way are not as complicated as you might think. Subscribe now and discover steps and small changes that can increase your energy and open the door to vibrant health and longevity.If this podcast has been helpful, please write a review. We'll see you next time.