How Reflexology Really Works | Best Pressure Points On The Body

when you hear the word reflexology you probably think of this idea of condensing the body down into these little map regions onto your hands or your feet and then you press a specific region on your hand or your foot and it magically heals another area of your body and although there is no research that shows that that is what's happening and that these map regions exist there are actually still powerful profound benefits reflexive benefits to stimulating key regions of the body and in this video i'm going to tell you about the three key regions that probably matter most and talk about these reflexive responses that can help us feel more relaxed can help reduce muscle tension can help you give you a better body awareness where your body is in space and to help you move better because how well we move is related to how well we can sense perceive our body and a key component of how we uh since our body has to do with our sensory receptors uh in a key sensory receptor the one that i have in mind i like to call them the body's natural position sensors uh they allow us to know where we are in space they're called proprioceptors now let me give you an example if i close my eyes right now i can i can hopefully touch my nose with my finger with my eyes closed all right and i can do different uh hand signs here with my eyes closed because these proprioceptors allow my body to know where i am in space now when we stimulate these receptors these proprioceptors when we can stimulate them there are they send signals up into our nerve pathways and they act as a little reset in the central nervous system and that's where we get those benefits when we reset those little loops in our nervous system that's what can help us relax help reduce muscle tension uh help us have a better body awareness and help us move better so i said i was going to talk about three key regions region number one let's talk about the bottoms of our feet and it makes sense that we have a lot of these receptors in the bottoms of our feet because in the bottoms of our feet that's where we spend a lot of time taking in the world around us our environment allowing us to know where we are in space so lots of information coming up from our feet and going into our nervous system and another note about the feet is because we've constrained them in shoes for so long and because we walk on such even terrain surfaces we don't get that good quality sensory information coming up into our foot so this is this is the reason i'm starting with this one because this one is so valuable and one of the ways that you can just stimulate that on your own is to use these little balls now these are special little fancy balls but you can use a lacrosse ball you could use a tennis ball and there's not a right or a wrong way to do this this is make it your own explore your body and you can roll your feet right in through here you saw me i kind of put my heel down and i roll back and forth sometimes i'll fan my feet out i'll get on a certain region and i'll fan my feet out sometimes i'll clinch my feet i'll roll back and forth you can use you know another ball we're going to try to get the middle part of the foot right there in what's called that plantar fascia get more towards the heel get more towards the outside of the foot but you just find key regions and you roll that out and again what we're doing here is sending that information uh sensory information up to the foot into the spinal cord and helping with these little reflex arcs that will help with relaxation throughout the rest of our body our lower especially our lower extremities our hips our knees this can help with people with low back pain um so rolling the feet getting that stimulation into the balls of the feet is very healthy now i said three regions let's talk about the other two regions and i'm going to kind of combine these two together because they're very similar as far as the density of how many we have in the body but the two other key regions are in the base of the skull right here what's called the upper cervical region and then also at the very lowest part of our low back there's an area called the sacrum this is really interesting to me as a chiropractor because some of the older techniques that were out there the more popular techniques for the longest time focused on those two key regions so you had chiropractic techniques called upper cervical technique that focused in on this upper cervical region and they felt like if you adjusted this area everything else just kind of magically would fall into place and then you had logan basic is it technique they focus on the sacrum and they felt like if you align that sacrum well everything else is going to magically align going upward and you have techniques called sacro occipital technique and cranial sacral technique so you've got all of these techniques that really focus in on those these uh two key regions there's not magic on how you have to stimulate it if you get massages in those regions especially chiropractic adjustments those can help stimulate these reflexive pathways that i'm talking about these reflexive pathways again that can help you feel more relaxed can help give you better body awareness it can actually help you move better so those are the kind of the ways that you can tap in to the powers of reflexology