Whether you are a professional footballer, a medic, a movement or manual therapist, a health profession or Joe Bloggs trying to live your best life. When you are truly working on living your best healthy life, healing from an injury or maintaining peak performance, you must look at organs and glands prior to muscles. On the hierarchy of survival muscles are slaves to the viscera and glands.
For example if I am looking at any sort of pain, chronic inflammation or injury, assessing the breath pattern must come as a priority. I like all clients regardless of their problems do to some form of meditation and yoga. This is because Yoga operates at multiple tier levels all at once. Lets look at the four tiers.
Tier 1 uses twists to compress the liver and kidney. Direct mechanised pressure release viscera vascular tension.
Tier 2 uses forward folds and extensions to load and de-load the posterior of visceral vascular structures. Inversions alter intra abdominal pressure and stimulate baroceptor activation.
Tier 3 – When yoga is practiced with interoceptive attention, when the practitioner is genuinely tracking internal sensation rather than achieving a certain position or shape, it develops flexibility of tier 3 simultaneously.
Yoga practiced as a performance such as just to get into the right positions or to achieve a certain aesthetic look will not achieve these three tiers. Yoga practice as a listening practice does and the distinction matters enormously.
Tier 4 is not really an intervention per se, it is the biological context within which all other interventions operate. Without it governing and working foundationally with the other tiers it is difficult to sustain.
When clients are referred to me via a surgeon, physio or other manual/health practitioner to strengthen muscles such as looking at the core. We must first start with the hierarchy of the organs and glands and other lifestyle factors such as sleep. Sleep is the brains waste clearance system called glymphatic system. (The glymphatic system is a brain-wide waste clearance network that becomes highly active during deep sleep, flushing out metabolic waste and neurotoxic proteins to maintain brain health). Sleep disturbances or deprivation can impair waste clearance, increasing the risk of neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s. The cerebral spinal fluid flows through the brains intestinal spaces clearing the neuro inflammatory by products that accumulate with chronic sympathetic dominance. Insufficient sleep, means insufficient clearance and this is high in shift workers working nights that go against the circadian rhythm.
All other interventions become useless or less effective unless the root cause is targeted. So sleep is the optimal biological system on which everything else rests. Without it the body cannot consolidate the other changes that the other interventions are that need to change. So the nutrition, viscera and internal environment are key. Whenever an organ is restricted and maintained in part of this inflammatory process in organ tissue, commonly the liver, gut and kidneys. These present anti inflammatory nutritional protocols that induce tissue tension that maintains the fascial restriction and keeps the loop going all the time.
You cannot eat your way out of visceral restriction within a week, but you can fully resolve a visceral or internal restriction when the inflammatory environment of the visceral/vascular system keeps recreating the tension that the manual therapy release in the last session. Therapists specializing in the are known as Barral.
So we can talk about omega 3 fatty acids, polyphenol rich foods, gut microbiome support, but unless you reduce the physiological load on the system to such foods that cause a reaction such as gluten, dairy, alcohol and refined sugar, nothing will change.
Bibliography
Matthew Sorenson podcast –