How Your Eyes Influence Movement

VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

Hi guys, Sophie here with the MVMT Place. 

So I was having a conversation with a couple of people today about how the visual system is really important for our movement and we did a little show-and-tell and I wanted to bring that to you and I want you to do this with me. This is a really quick and efficient way to show you, for you to feel in your body, why and how the eyes are so important in how we move every day. 

So I'm going to wait and I'll let you stand up and while you're standing you're just going to pick an arm. You can keep the arm straight and you're going to bring that up overhead. So I don't want you trying to get it far back by rotating and spinning through your body. I want you to keep your body still, bring the arm up and see where it stops. You’re going to try to keep bringing that arm all the way back as much as you can. I'm looking straight ahead and from here I'm just going to quickly snap my eyes down. And, I’m waiting, go ahead and get in this position. Bring your arm all the way back as much as you can without compromising or compensating elsewhere in the body and I’ve not going to move of my head I'm just going to let my eyes down to the floor and now I'm going to see if my arm and, it does, goes back further, my eyes are still down, and now I'm going to come out in that. Did it work? Isn’t that weird? But it's really helpful because let's say you're having a hard time reaching something high on the shelf you can snap your eyes down and then you can reach it. And why this is helpful for me as a movement teacher or Pilates instructor is if I have someone coming in and they have shoulder pain or they're having a hard time with anything that they're trying to do overhead because they can't reach it, then I can use the eyes too short cut the system and then we can start to strengthen in that new range of motion. 

It's really important and it also works in other directions. 

I can bring my arm back behind me using our extensors and I'm bringing the arms back behind me right here, I'm looking straight ahead, and what happens if I'm trying to bring it up as high as I can, and that's really, I can't go any further, I start to few too much tension here and it just doesn't go.  I’m looking straight ahead, not at you, because I'm trying to show you why what happens if I snapped my eyes up and now my arm goes up even further.  I didn't change anything here, right? So try that!  If you have questions on why that works type them in the comment below. Share this video with someone.  Do you have a range of motion problem or you're trying to improve your shoulder range of motion, maybe your hip or leg range of motion.? 

This is why our visual system is so important and how we move and I implement this in our sessions when it's appropriate. There’s still so much more to know about the visual system but this is just a really quick trick to see and demonstrate to you how your eyes are so important in how we move. 

I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you did it with me and I wasn't doing this all by myself! If you have questions please comment below.