The Connection between Optimal Health and Performance [ Video ]

We continue on our theme about optimal health and performance.  We focus on body function and improving how well your body works by improving how well the nervous system works. True health is about getting your body to function at a hundred percent. If we start asking ourselves what part of the body controls all functions we have to automatically go to the fact that it’s our brain.

Brain Body Connection for Optimal Health and Performance

Optimal health and performance are related and reliant on the way our brain works.  The brain sends messages down the spinal cord and out through nerves to every single organ, every muscle, every joint, and every cell in the body. Your body is totally dependent on that brain energy, that nerve energy going down the spinal cord to those organs. So for instance, if I were to take a pair of scissors and sever all the nerves and went to a lung, we lose function of that lung immediately.

Protecting the Nervous System

A lesser-known fact though it is very much clinically relevant, is what happens if I compress, choke, pinch or kink these nerves? Or, what happens to the messages first? All the messages can’t get through to that organ or the tissue at the highest level, and if those messages don’t get through over a long enough time, that tissue, whether it’s an organ or muscle or joint, decreases its function and eventually leads to symptoms, sickness, even disease.  As a result, our optimal health and performance are impaired.

Many Factors Optimize Nervous System Functioning

So when I’m talking about optimizing my performance, I’m talking about optimizing my health, I’m talking about optimizing my nervous system function.  Already as we’ve focused on a number factors that impact our optimal health and performance. We’ve talked about meditation. We’ve talked about magnesium. We’ve talked about exercise. We’ve talked about the importance of treating your body like a temple with respect to her food choices, honoring with godly foods. We also talk about decreasing sugars and decreasing overall stress in our body. We also have to be mindful of the physical stress that we place on these nerves.

Importance of Good Body Posture

As a chiropractor, I’m looking at that all day long and so when we look at our body, we also have to have our body in alignment. It’s not enough just to have our goals and our headspace in alignment, we also have to have our physical body in alignment because when it is in alignment, we have very strong, very good posture that can actually slow down the aging process.

When our alignment is good, or posture is strong and we have a good range of motion which will decrease our pain in our neck or shoulders or lower back or hips or ankles and even our feet. However, because of stresses in life, we have shifts in our spine. We have muscle tension, accidents and falls and we literally alter the alignment of our spine.  Sometimes the body can’t just bounce back and it gets stuck in these positions and if that’s the case, we have now weakened our posture, again impacting our optimal health and performance.

Optimal Health and Performance is about Full Alignment

When we weaken our ability to stay strong in a gravity field environment and we start to break down our joints, we also start to compress or choke or pinch these very delicate spinal nerves that go to all your organs, cells and tissues. When that happens, it’s harder for your brain to communicate to the rest of your organs and your body. So this is why it’s very important, as we’ve discussed over the last several months to not only make sure that your spiritual place is in alignment, that your relationships are in alignment, that your physical health in regards to fitness is in alignment, your food choices are in alignment – all of these things in alignment with your goals, but is also extremely important that your body structure is in aligned to optimize how well your brain can talk to your body,