3 Powerful Nerves
In this episode, I share why I believe these 3 nerves are so powerful to target for manual therapy, nerve glides, or movement drills. The 3 nerves are the trigeminal nerve, the accessory nerve, and the obturator nerve.
I break down the connections to the fascial containers of our axial skeleton and the role they play in viscera and neural influences on the body, why they are easy to target, and why spinal articulation can also be a powerful tool to combine with these nerve glides and targeted treatment.
During this episode, I also share about recently learning that the pelvic splanchnic nerves, which have been classified as parasympathetic for decades, in fact, are not! So what does this mean for us and our understanding of the ANS? Listen to hear my thoughts on it.
Resources mentioned in the podcast:
The Barral Institute- if you sign up for a course be sure to let the know Anna Hartman referred you!
The Power of the Trigeminal Nerve episode 28 Cervical fascia containers (CRAZY Link Between Neck Pain & Reflux | Neck Pain Home Treatments)
SCIENCE article- Sacral Autonomic Outflow is Sympathetic
SCIENCE article- Neural Circuits get Rewired
Trigeminal Nerve Glide
Erb's Point
Accessory Nerve Glide
Obturator Nerve Glide
Spinal Roll Down
Considering the viscera as a source of musculoskeletal pain and dysfunction is a great way to ensure a more true whole body approach to care, however it can be a bit overwhelming on where to start, which is exactly why I created the Visceral Referral Cheat Sheet. This FREE download will help you to learn the most common visceral referral patterns affecting the musculoskeletal system. Download it at www.unrealresultspod.com
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Anna Hartman: Hey there and welcome. I'm Anna Hartman and this is Unreal Results, a podcast where I help you get better outcomes and gain the confidence that you can help anyone, even the most complex cases. Join me as I teach about the influence of the visceral organs and the nervous system on movement, pain, and injuries, all while shifting the paradigm of what whole body assessment and treatment really looks like.
I'm glad you're here. Let's dive in.
Hello there, and welcome to another episode of the Unreal Results podcast. Um, it's not, it's another one of those weeks that feels like it's It feels like multiple weeks since I recorded the podcast, but it really hasn't been that long. And, um, time is just so funny like that. I, um, this past weekend I was at a continuing education class, um, with the Barral Institute.
Of course, I took the visceral vascular manipulation of the upper extremity or upper. body, upper body, I guess. Um, because it's not just the extremity. It's includes a lot in the thorax. Um, it was very good class. Uh, same teacher I had for manual articular of the spine and pelvis earlier this year, Lisa Brady Grant.
She is a chiropractor in the Jackson hole, Wyoming area. Um, She's excellent. I have really enjoyed her teaching style and her as a person. Um, I'm just always really happy when I go to one of her courses. Uh, so it was a great course, learned a ton of really specific techniques around the heart, the vessels of the heart, the pulmonary vessels, and then the subclavian vessels, the Um, brachial artery, the carotids, branches of the carotids, um, really cool stuff.
And, um, yeah, really cool stuff. So I'm excited to be able to implement it with my clients and play around. on my own body and with movement, um, to see if I can recreate some of the experiences of the techniques in a more, um, movement oriented sort of way. So I think the ones that are sort of like In my brain right now of what I want to try is one specifically for the vertebral arteries, which cleared up my like cervical flexion a lot.
I used to be able to, like when I, before the class, if I were to side bend to the left, cervical side bending, I get like an inch and it's like, Uh, stops. And after that class, it's like, I can completely side bend to the left. Now I just feel like a big stretch on the right, probably because it hasn't side bent to the left in so long.
And that was after treating specifically my left vertebral artery. And it was, such a cool technique. And, um, I actually really think it's one that I can create into a general technique. Um, and then the other one that, um, feels so good and I think everyone could stand to do. Um, and also I think I could, um, create into like a self treatment technique or at least like a movement style is on the pulmonary vessels.
Um, so the pulmonary vessels that go from the heart to the lungs. Um, so everything else is a little bit more specific. There's definitely areas that we can do skin lift techniques, some key spots, understanding the anatomy in the neck, um, which will be really helpful, um, more for when I'm teaching practitioners in my courses.
But, um, that's, yeah, I'm excited to explore it more, you know, and that's always how my brain is too. When I go to these courses is like. It's, it's like, of course, like, a no brainer how I can use the techniques to help my clients. Of course, informing my hands, getting new techniques down, like, are, is always so important.
But also in my brain, I'm always kind of looking for that overarching, like, well, how can I support this with movement? How can I support this through self care? How can I support this in my own body or teach people how to support this in their own body? Because it is such important work.
Part of that too is just sharing the anatomy. Um, you know, whenever this was actually, I asked on Instagram for podcast ideas. This was actually one of my podcast ideas was just to talk about the relationship between proprioception and understanding the anatomy. And this is why it is so powerful to be.
constantly revisiting the anatomy for yourself as the practitioner, but also be teaching your athletes the anatomy because when we have a better awareness of our anatomy, it improves our proprioception. So in these classes too, it's really unique because you learn the anatomy, you feel it with your hands as well.
And then when someone works on you, it's like, you can feel it in your own body. And to be able to specifically spotlight your attention on one little piece of anatomy. Oh, so one of the things was we did a treatment for the coronary arteries. So you, one hand is like at the base of the aorta. And then the other hand is doing a technique, a lengthening technique to the core, different coronary arteries, the left one and the right one.
And, and. It is wild that you can feel that and, but part of the reason of being able to feel it is like being aware that it is right there and it, and what it, you know, and the quality of which tubes, uh, vascular, like arterial tubes feel like, and that kind of thing. So, um, it's just so interesting anyways, um, that is not what the podcast is about, but I did want to share that.
I did that course. Um. You know, it's a good reminder too, especially as I talk to practitioners in those courses. Um, my whole goal with the podcast, with all of my education is to spread the word of a whole organism approach to treatment and assessment, to understand and see the body through this process.
Lens of view of an organism that is constantly drew driven by the, um, need to survive, right? The sole purpose of the organism is to survive and how that in our nervous system, how that sole purpose affects our movement. And then also how that intelligence of the organism then provides The input or provides the output, input and output to determine how much mobility we have, what our strengths like, like our postures are all dictated based on how safe we feel.
And also understanding that there is a way that you can assess and evaluate the body that the tissues can speak to your hand, the tissues can speak to you and direct you where to go as opposed to always defaulting to someone else's bias about what the most important thing to the body is. Well, not just to the body, because that is.
That is survival, right? But, um, the bias of what the most important body part is to the body when it comes to movement, dysfunction, movement, compensation, um, performance, pain, et cetera, right? So realizing so often how we operate on this lens of view of like, if my knee hurts, like, oh, it's because my foot.
Is jacked up, right? Like I have bad foot mobility or ankle mobility or control, or maybe if my knee hurts because of my hip or because of my core, right? Those are biases that we operate off of based on whoever we learn from, and it is not true to the person in front of us all the time. Or maybe it's true that someone's core is the problem or someone's foot is the problem.
But the reason why the core is not reflexively turning on like we'd like it, or the foot is not, um, expressing its full mobility like it should is actually because the body is not allowing that mobility, not allowing that strength because it is in this protective mode around an organ or just in general protecting the organism.
As a need to survive, right? So, so my goal is with all my teaching is to expose you to this new lens of view to teach you about the anatomy of the viscera, about the neuro anatomy, about the neuro physiology, this overarching concept of an organism versus parts. Um, but then also, you know, so my goal is never to replace Thanks.
The education of like the Barral Institute teaches is to open your eyes to the fact that it's even out there and that it's important and, um, share how much there is truly to learn. And so, um, and like I said, in the beginning, like every course I take too, it's not just a, like, how does this technique, this manual therapy technique help me help my patients.
It's also like. How can I take this and integrate it into all the things that I'm already doing and from a person like me who it comes from a very strong movement and like strength and conditioning background, um, that's, and also like, I feel like that's the easiest way for people to improve their own health.
is, is moving their body and learning about their body and moving it and massaging it and like doing all the things, right? And so I'm trying to, um, I'm trying to bridge that. And so I still encourage you all to take the Barral Institute classes. It is an excellent education. It is a very important skill set to have in your hand if you want to do manual therapy.
Um, and I am actually getting the point too, with my education programs, you know, people who have gone through my mentorship, gone through the LTAP, um, in person, gone through the LTAP online, gone through the results, cheat code, done all the other little courses like the swelling course and the never treat the shoulder first course.
They've done all my things and they want to learn more and they're intrigued by this new lens of view and so they're starting to go to the Barral Institute courses too and it's just so cool now to mentor them and like weave it all together and, um, you know. That is just the coolest thing. So, um, kind of got off on a tangent there, but I just kind of wanted to remind you that my goal is not to replace an education like that.
My goal is to make it more accessible for people and to make it. more assimilated into the orthopedic based work, um, and the movement based work that so many of us already do. Alright, so you can see that you do have an ability to influence the visceral organs and influence the nervous system easily and leverage this fundamental Piece of what it means to be this whole integrated, intelligent, um, sentiment, like being right.
That is literally wired for survival. So, um, with that said, this podcast episode 12 minutes in, I'm finally getting to it. Um, um, it's going to be the three, three nerve glides you need to be trying on everyone. And, um, This is sort of like, whenever I go to talk, I've given a couple talks lately about this like, lens of view, and I'm always like Show some anatomy in the fascial containers, and I'm like, if all you get of this talk is do these three, try out these three nerve glides and see how they work, I think you should do that.
This is why. So, the three nerves in nerve glides, I guess, because it doesn't always have to be a nerve glide, just the three nerves that you want to consider when you're working with the body from this lens of view. That are super powerful. I see change things significantly on almost every person I work with, um, are the trigeminal nerve, which I did a whole entire podcast episode on the trigeminal nerve.
So I'll make sure to link that in the show notes, obviously, but, um, I, uh, I, you know, I want to get a little bit more like, just give it a little bit more airtime here because the trigeminal nerve is amazing. And then the accessory nerve. So, two cranial nerves, so the trigeminal nerve, 5, accessory nerve, which is cranial nerve 11, and then the obturator nerve, and the obturator nerve is part of the lumbar plexus nerves.
With that said, so those three nerves, though they are I'm telling you to try them out and see how powerful they are. It is not the only nerves that are going to affect the structures that I'm telling you about. The reason why I think they're great nerves to focus on is because they're actually really easy to affect.
And I speak to this a lot when I And in teaching assessment, there's these, this concept of using what's called an inhibition test in the osteopathic world. But in order for the inhibition test to be good, um, you need to be, you need to have something that has the potential for change in terms of it needs to be a.
an orthopedic assessment that you would use that it has potential to for me to see a significant difference when I assess it, do something and then reassess it and potentially see a change, right? So, um, this, This means that I have a high possibility of getting good information from it. If I choose a test that has a lot of room for interpretation, or is so similar to, you know, whatever normal is, or what the other side is, that if it changes, I don't notice, So this is sort of the same concept of these three nerves, the trigeminal nerve, the accessory nerve and the operator nerve.
What makes them such great nerves to influence is because they're, the, the treatment, Whether it be a nerve glide or like some sort of skin stimulation or manual therapy type treatment Those nerves are really easy to target. Okay
There as you learn the neural anatomy of all the whole body There's a lot of nerves that we could pick and I'm gonna also share on this episode too like one other thing that is a good orthopedic thing to include when you are suspecting That there may be a visceral driver of things. So, excuse my yawn.
This is, I always laugh because my YouTube editor, um, Doc Joe O, Joe, um, in editing some videos for me earlier this year, I gave him this like case video that I had and I said, Hey, could you edit this? I think it's, it's a really good case that highlights, you know, never treat the shoulder first and, uh, I'd love to use it.
I was like, but, you know, it's not the greatest video quality. And I was like, honestly, I yawn a lot in it. And, uh, so see what you can do with it. And it was so funny because he made a 30 second video of a montage of all of my yawns. And, um, that Was classic and I do this time of year. I yawn a lot. I get tired and I yawn So even though yawns aren't necessarily always related to tiredness They are related to your nervous system and alertness standpoint.
So I think that's why It happens because I do notice that when I'm tired and I need to do presentations like this, I end up yawning quite a bit. And so I think that is what it is. My nervous system just like trying to keep me like higher, higher, um. Sympathetic, driven, and so I stay more focused and alert, but it's just like so funny that that is the case.
So anyways, that was a sidebar in my yawning. Um, So these three nerves, um, So each of them, why I think they're powerful is each of them innervates the fascial containers In the body and specifically the fascial containers around the organs. So the fascial containers around the organs are the container within the cranium, fascial containers within the neck.
Within the thoracic cavity, which is above the diaphragm, and then within the abdominal and pelvic cavity, right? So each of those have a different name, right? So in the abdominal and pelvic cavity, it's the peritoneum. In the thoracic cavity, you know, in the, um, Where the lungs are, it's the pleural, pleural, it's the pleural, I'm like bleh, it's the pleura, the parietal pleura or the visceral pleura, um, and then in the mediastinum, which is where the heart and the esophagus and the vessels live, we have a mediastinal pleura as well as an extension of the fascia from the neck.
Um, the fascia in the neck, we have deep cervical fascia, we have middle cervical fascia and superficial cervical fascia. So there's actually, um, two containers, um, within the whole container in the neck. And actually I have, um, a video on YouTube that explains the cervical containers. And so I'll make sure to link that in the show notes for you too, cause it's just.
if you don't know cervical anatomy, it may be helpful for you to understand. Um, but so those are some fascial containers. And then the fascial containers in the, um, cranium are the meninges or the dura, which the meninges are just a thickening of the dura. So, um, and interesting, much like the relationship to the,
Much like the relationship to the mesentery and much like the relationship to the visceral pleura and the parietal pleura in the in the Thorax and the thoracic cavity, the dura and the brain has like a rough side and a smooth side. Um, it's just different, it's a different like, um, anatomical makeup of the connective tissue.
But um, so, all of those fascial containers. pressurized containers, right? We are all, uh, uh, our body is like a sequence of macro vacuoles. So see the work of Jean Claude Gimberteau. Um, thanks to the fascial system, we have these large spaces that are pressurized. And, uh, when we change the pressure within the cavities within these containers, organs feel it, right?
The organs and the container itself feels it. And this pressure, um, you know, so the, you feel, the body feels these pressure changes through the mechanoreceptors that are either within the organ themselves or within the lining of the organs, these peritoneums, these meninges, these just fascial pieces of fascia, right?
So the nerves are innervating, directly innervating this fascia. So, um, something to consider too, when we're talking about fascial containers, anywhere on the body, the fascia is innervated too. Um, the nerves actually are innervated too. Like nerves have nerves. Nerves have blood vessels. So, so it's like there's always like another layer back, right?
So I want you, I want you to also understand that these are not the only nerves innervating these structures. Like I said at the beginning, these are nerves that are easily accessible to us from a movement or touch standpoint. So that's why we're choosing them. But also the fact, like, for example, the fascial containers of the neck.
You know, partly, scientists have not, like, dissected it out to know fully, but it is assumed that the fascial container itself is innervated by the nerves that innervate the muscles. next to those fascial containers, or by the nerves that go through those fascial containers, or by the nerves that innervate the neck.
And that's sort of a relationship, too, that I refer to a lot called Hilton's Law. The nerves that innervate the skin on the neck are the same nerves that innervate the deeper structures. So because we're talking about the trigeminal nerve, The trigeminal nerve is a really big cranial nerve that innervates the head, but it also innervates the muscles of the neck, and therefore the fascia of the neck, but also the trigeminal nerve innervates the, um, dura of the brain, so inside the cranium is innervated by the trigeminal nerve as well as the neck.
Accessory nerve, same thing, accessory nerve innervates some of the structures of the fascial containers of the neck, but also the accessory nerve is interesting because of its close relationship to the glossopharyngeal nerve. The vagus nerve, it basically anastomoses with it, in fact the cranial piece of the accessory nerve is considered part of the vagus nerve.
As well as the accessory nerve and the phrenic nerve are closely related and that's what we're using for the thoracic cavity and the, um, thoracic cavity and the upper part of the abdominal cavity is the accessory nerve relationships and the accessory nerve You know, because it innervates the muscles of the neck, it probably also innervates some of that neck fascia, too.
Not just through the anastomosis with the other nerves. And that neck fascia is continuous with thoracic fascia, and that thoracic fascia is continuous with the abdominal fascia. So you see how everything's kind of connected anyway. Um, so then, um, the obturator nerve is the last one. The obturator nerve is a long nerve that comes out of our lumbar sacral plexus, and it innervates the SI joint, the hip joint, and the knee joint, as well as skin on the inside of the thigh, um, our adductor muscles, and our pleura, pleura, not our pleura, but our peritoneum of our, um, abdomen and pelvis.
And so it's a really way to, to affect the peritoneum in the lower part of the abdominal and pelvic cavity. It's not the only way. The peritoneum is also innervated by our, our thoracic sympathetics and, um, basically at the same level of the dermatomes. So the dermatomes that come out of the thoracic, um, or, Uh, the thoracic, excuse me, the thoracic spine wrap around the body in like a layered effect and so each one of those layers, those spinal nerves innervates the peritoneum as well, which actually goes to my next point in.
That another way to have a really great effect on the visceral organs is to make sure that your programming, your movement snacks for the day involve segmental spine mobility, especially segmental spine mobility in the neck and thorax. Right? So this is so important for the innervation of both the container of the organ and then the sympathetics to the organ itself.
And here's another little tangent for you. Um, might turn into a big tangent for you, but recently, uh, one of the physical therapists in my course Um, Leslie Bloodworth. She is a PT out in Arizona, Scottsdale area, I believe, if you need a good person. Um, but she pointed out, um, that there was a recent study that proved that the pelvic splenic nerves, which have classically for decades been classified as parasympathetic nerves are in fact not parasympathetic at all.
And then, Stephanie Camela, who is one of the Movement Rev education alumni as well, she's been through all of the courses, not just LTAP, but the, um, mentorship multiple times as well. She is the, uh, one of the co founders of Zebrafish Neuro. She just attended Gil Headley's, um, um, nerve to her. And, uh, he shared that same thing that the pelvic flank, like nerves were not parasympathetic, that they're actually sympathetic.
And, um, she texts me too. And I was like, Oh my gosh, did you know, this is blowing my mind. And I was like, actually, I did know this and note to self, I need to start making those changes in my curriculum to reflect it. And, um, but also though it's cool. Whenever we know something better, it doesn't really change my approach or change what I'm doing because I still know that those nerves are important.
Just like the spinal nerves, relaying the sympathetic information. So it's just more sympathetic information. We, this is a total tangent. And I spoke about it a little bit on the, um, podcast episode from a couple weeks ago about the parasympathetic nervous system, but in our, in our quest to learn, we have a tendency to get very black and white on.
the autonomic nervous system. We tend to believe that the autonomic nervous system has a good one, good part and a bad part, right? Um, this is like, because society tends to put us in this very binary, um, way of thinking. It's just how our brain is sort of defaulted to think in the binary. Yes, no, black, white, um, male, female, like all the things, all the binary things, right?
So, but from an autonomic nervous system standpoint and life standpoint, we know that's not true. We know it's both and, oftentimes. And so, the sympathetic is not. bad and the parasympathetic is not good. Um, and vice versa. They're, the sympathetic is not good and it's parasympathetic. It's not bad, right?
There's just, they need to work together. We need for a wonderfully functioning organism, we need Sympathetic inputs, and we need parasympathetic inputs, and we need both of them to be robust and resilient together. It is when they are not both robust and resilient together that we try, we tend to have some hyper sympathetic, and this goes back to sort of just our evolution, again, we're wired for survival, so we're wired into this.
Sympathetic response, which mobilizes things and the parasympathetic is sort of our thing that sort of is like, Oh, okay, we're safe, right? So oftentimes what's missing in our health is just a message of like, we're safe, we're cool. We can rest. That doesn't make the sympathetic stuff bad. That doesn't make the sympathetic bad.
The sympathetic is good and useful, but oftentimes we need more rest. Which was what that whole episode was about. And rest in the, in a different sense than just sleep. Though we all know how powerful sleep is. Okay, so that was a kind of a sidebar. So knowing that the pelvic spleen like nerves. are not parasympathetic.
Does it change my emphasis on targeting them and influencing the organs and the parts of our body that are influenced by those nerves? No, because the way our body is set up is more information, more information with the overarching understanding that that information is relaying a message of safety always will have a positive Effect on our outputs and our outputs being our movement and our pain.
So I'm, I still think, you know, so my, one of my favorite ways to target the pelvic splenic nerves was using a, uh, ball under the sacrum doing like pelvic clocks. I'm still going to do that. because it's still really good information, and because it changes the shape of the pelvis, which changes the space within the container, which then influences both the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system, changing, by changing pressures, and changing pressures, Can be a good thing, can be a bad thing too, right?
It just depends on the safety component of it and what we're going for. Most of the time when we're improving pressure in the pelvis, we're decreasing pressure. So, um, that's fun information. I'll link in the show notes the, um, article that is from, it was in the Science, uh, in 2016, so it's been almost, almost 10 years, it's been 8 years since that was published, almost 7 years, and so, yeah, things take time to, like, trickle down the pipeline, right?
Um, but, not gonna really change things. So, I shared, you know, these, so these 3 nerves I want you to focus on. The trigeminal nerve, let's go back to the top, the trigeminal nerve. I already told you what it innervated. So how do we affect it? The trigeminal nerve we can affect by doing skin stimulation on our face.
We can affect it by doing hair pull on our scalp, especially the front of our scalp here. Massage to the ears. Um, massage to the gum line, we can affect it with, um, very specific spots, if you want to get real specific, in our eye orbit, whenever you feel a little notch, that's a branch where a nerve comes out, same thing along our cheekbones, there's a little notch here.
That's where a nerve comes out. There's a little notch to the side of your chin. That's where a branch comes out. So you can do a little skin stretch, massage in those areas, and have a pretty powerful effect. The um, same thing in the scalp or just doing the hair pull. So that, so, such a simple way to get trigeminal nerve.
Sometimes I just do tapping. So remember too, when it comes to touch, when we have a, a nerve that innervates the skin, different types of touch will elicit a different response. So yes, use your hands, but also use. Different objects. So sometimes like a tissue is good for the face or different fabric, right?
This has little like it's almost like a little brush feels pretty good Some of the like wash off skin rollers can be really great But just doing skin stimulation along there is really helpful now there is a nerve glide you can do for it that is pretty popular and it's based on the fact that the main sort of um main part of the nerve before it splits into three parts, right, because the trigeminal nerve splits into the ophthalmic, the maxillary, and then the mandibular branch, but all of them come back to this ganglia, which sort of sits, like, if I were to find the intersection between my finger and this finger, sort of sits right there, which relatively ends up being, like, right in front of your ear.
So if we think of we're trying to lengthen the nerve from that spot, sometimes this nerve glide makes more sense, but you're going to get really tall, whatever side you decide to do. Um, sometimes it's helpful to clench your teeth. So the trigeminal nerve is mainly a sensory nerve, but then also provides motor to the masseter, the, the, the clencher of the jaw.
So for me, I'm a little weaker feeling on my right side. So I'm going to do a trigeminal nerve glide for the right. I always tell people too, I think of the nerve glide specifically getting the motor branch of the nerve a little bit more than the rest of them. So there is value in trying the different things.
So you're going to get nice and tall. Do a double chin. You're going to side bend away from that side and then open your jaw halfway and then slide your jaw to the opposite shoulder, sort of like a typewriter.
Do about six of them and then recheck something. Recheck how you feel. So, you know, what I didn't say before we do these innervations, you got to check something. You could check your heart rate. You could check your respiratory rate, your breath capacity, your breath. pattern, you could check trunk rotation, you could check shoulder internal rotation, you could check a squat, literally anything, but just make sure it gives you some good information.
So, um, my shoulders are actually pretty good, probably from all that vascular work I had. External could be better on both of them. Maybe we'll go left external rotation for me. And then that trigeminal nerve, you can actually add rotation into it a little bit too. So double chin, side bend, slightly rotate, open jaw, and go.
And then Recheck. So yeah, that gave me a little bit more external rotation. Uh, so that is positive. But again, hopefully you're trying these when you're thinking there might be some sort of visceral or neural thing going on in your patients and you're taking all the objective measurements and then you're going to do this and just recheck and you might be surprised that it might change someone's ankle mobility.
So that's trigeminal nerve, accessory nerve, um, it comes out in this area right behind your sternal mastoid called Erb's Pots, Erb's Point, and it innervates the sternal mastoid and the trap and like I said the fascial containers. And so we're going to, it looks a little similar to a trigeminal nerve, but, um, involves a shoulder.
You can pick it based on, you can do a motor test, shrugging your shoulders and holding for about 30 seconds. And you can instantly see my right side starts to drop down a little bit. So that's going to be the side I pick to do. So you're going to get nice and tall, double chin with your neck again. Side bend your head away from that side.
Now this time we're going to depress the shoulder, retract it, stick the head out like a turtle, and then cervical nod. This might feel like a trap stretch.
And then. We'll reassess. You can reassess the motor test, or we can reassess my external rotation, which improved as well. And then the next one is obturator nerve. Obturator nerve, um, is down in your hip. You're going to, I like to do it half kneeling. You're going to go into half kneeling with that side down.
So, which side would you pick? Um, this one you can pick based on, like, maybe your hip flexion range of motion, what side, you know, of a squat feels like you get more hip mobility, or you can just do both sides. It's not going to hurt you to do both, um, but let's say you're doing the right side of the obturator nerve.
You're going to do knee down, half kneeling. So knee down on the right, go into half kneeling, then open up the left leg into abduction. So then you can, um, weight shift over to the left leg, which would bring your down leg into hip abduction. Once you're there, you get your spine nice and tall, and then you're going to tuck your tail under, right?
So post your tilt your pelvis. And then un posture tilted. That is the repetition. You can, if you don't have tension with this down the inside of your groin, you can add in cervical and thoracic flexion, and then do the pelvis to increase it. And if that still doesn't create any, you can also side bend, or sorry, rotate.
towards away or side bend away to lengthen that nerve out a little bit, but most people feel it right out of the gate. This one tends to have a lot of tension on it, so you'll do six repetitions and then recheck things. You will be surprised often how much it changes. So, um, That nerve innervates a lot of things.
So that's as simple as it can be to change inputs from the visceral organs and make the body feel safer and grant more mobility, decrease pain. Um, and the other one, other thing I said is to integrate some forms of like spinal. Segmental spinal mobility. This might look like a cat cow exercise. It might look like a, um, assisted roll down or a standing spine spinal roll down like a Jefferson curl.
It might look like a, um. Diaphragm stretch from a glute bridge position, right? Like a segmental bridge. It could literally be anything. Could be ragdoll. There's many ways to do spinal articulation in our spine, but these are really good too to influence all of the spinal nerve roots that are innervating the containers as well.
So that's it. A lot of links for you in this, uh, podcast, but these are like the top three nerve glides that I would try on people and just be curious, see what changes, you know, if you don't have a way to see if the viscera or the central nervous system is influencing someone's movement assessment. You know, you haven't taken the LTAP or the results cheat code, then that's okay.
You can still see how these nerve glides affect the orthopedic tests you're doing, right? Don't think that because it's not directly connected, it's not going to have effect because everything's connected. And when you've seen the body from this visceral lens of view, this neural lens of view, you are.
Inherently, we'll start to be a little bit more curious and open to trying different things out. And the cool thing is, when you try easy things like this out and it makes a huge difference, then you don't have to work so hard. This is so important for me as someone who worked on such large humans. Um, a lot of my football players were big guys, right?
Like, Almost seven feet tall and over 300 pounds. I am not that big and You can only work on those big guys forcing things right Manipulating doing joint mobs deep tissue for so long before your own body breaks down So doing things like this, which seemingly feel like nothing can eliminate a lot of the need to Do forceful things to the body Hope you enjoyed that.
Um, fun little episode. Hopefully it's pretty practical. Definitely check out the links in the show notes. I'll add the tutorials and all the things and, um, yeah. Cheers to another episode and, uh, we'll see you next week. Yeah, next week is the week before Christmas. Um, I'll probably do one more episode, um, then, uh, probably take the week of Christmas off and then start right back up, uh, the following week.
So, have a great one. Bye bye.
