Better Movement

Share this post
Head And Eye Stabilization
toddhargrove.substack.com

Head And Eye Stabilization

An underrated fundamental movement skill

Todd Hargrove
Feb 17
6
3
Share this post
Head And Eye Stabilization
toddhargrove.substack.com

One of the most important physical tasks for any animal is stabilizing the head so the eyes can focus on a target. This is easy enough in a static environment. But during dynamic activity, it's a major challenge. For example, imagine flying through the air at high speed and keeping your eyes locked on a running rabbit. Here’s a demo of the head stabilization skills you will need to catch dinner:

How does the hawk do this? The details are highly complex but we know in a very general sense that the visual system is communicating very quickly with the vestibular system and the muscles that control posture.

Birds are especially good at this. Here's a fun video of a kingfisher, keeping its head rock steady even at its body wobbles around on a reed:

Even chickens are impressive. This looks like CGI:

After seeing this I immediately wondered why chickens bob their heads back-and-forth while walking. The answer has something to do with head stabilization. As their body advances forward, the head stays motionless in space for a millisecond or two, so the eyes can stay remain focused on potential food targets on the ground. At some point the head needs to catch up with the body, so it darts forward quickly in advance of the body so it can hang our for another millisecond until the body catches up, and and so forth.

It's not just birds who have good head stabilization. Here’s an example of a cheetah running after a moving target. The whole spine undulates but the head is amazingly steady:

Keeping the head stable serves a dual purpose – the eyes get a better view, and the vestibular organs remain level, so their sensory information is easier to interpret, making balance easier.

In humans, this latter point is especially important, because we have huge heads balanced on long vertical spines. Any deviation of the head away from a neutral position can have large effects on full body balance.

It's pretty easy to feel the postural effects of having the head look in a different direction from where the body is moving. Try walking in a perfectly straight line, as if you were on a narrow pathway. Then slowly turn your head to scan the horizon left or right. You may notice that it becomes harder to keep a straight line, or that your trunk muscles stiffen to help you do so. It’s even harder if you look upward, or turn the head with more speed.

Even when you walk while looking straight ahead, the head must differentiate from the trunk to stabilize the gaze, because the trunk is rotating and tilting a little bit from side to side. As people age, the head starts to move along with trunk, which may be part of the reason they walk more slowly and with smaller steps, which reduces the acceleration of the head.

The major takeaway here is that head stabilization associated with visual tracking is a very fundamental movement skill that is involved in a wide range of different activities. Here are some ideas for incorporating visual targeting challenges in to your exercise.

While walking or running, scan the horizon left to right and up to down, as if you were on the look out for predators.

If you are doing sprint training, try going as fast as you can in a straight line while looking left or right. If you play a sport like soccer or American football, this is something you will be doing very often in a game.

When you’re doing an agility drill, add a visual challenge, such as the need to track the movements of a ball or an opponent. (The most popular versions are called playing tag or catch.)

There are some activities where gaze stabilization points the way to good technique. In tennis and golf, one of the fundamentals of a good swing is keeping the head steady while the shoulders move. Dancers improve their balance in a spin by keeping their eyes fixed on a specific point. Technique in lateral shuffling gets better if you try to keep the eyes level. When I practice my movement around the squash court, I will sometimes make sure the flow of visual information remains steady and smooth. This means I am minimizing unnecessary accelerations of the head, making it easier to track the ball and stay in balance. This requires coordinated action from head to toe.

A common theme in Feldenkrais lessons (by the way you can sign up for some lessons here) is integrating and differentiating movements of the head and eyes with the trunk and pelvis.

I’m sure I’m only scratching the surface of this topic here, so if you have any ideas you'd like to share, please do so in the comments.

Share


Related articles

Better Movement
Rolling, Righting and Posture
This post is an excerpt from a new book that I’m (very slowly) writing called Healthy Movements for Human Animals: An Evolutionary Perspective on Exercise. Each chapter is about a different “primal” movement like squatting, crawling, climbing or throwing. This excerpt is about rolling. (A previous…
Read more
6 months ago · 1 like · 1 comment · Todd Hargrove
Better Movement
The Science of Smooth Movement
“Smoothness” is widely recognized as a defining aesthetic quality of expert movement. When we see Roger Federer hit a backhand, his movement is fluid and graceful, and this tells us he is doing something very right. And just as surely, we know that tennis novices are doing somehow very wrong as they hack away at the ball with jagged strokes. The quality…
Read more
3 years ago · 1 like · Todd Hargrove
Better Movement
Quiet Eyes and Coordination
There is an interesting and robust line of research on the benefits of a "quiet eye" in sports that have targets, like golf, billiards or basketball. It finds that experts fix their gaze on the target earlier and longer than novices, and longer on hits than misses. I find this interesting because it's another example of the…
Read more
a year ago · Todd Hargrove
3
Share this post
Head And Eye Stabilization
toddhargrove.substack.com
3 Comments

Create your profile

0 subscriptions will be displayed on your profile (edit)

Skip for now

Only paid subscribers can comment on this post

Already a paid subscriber? Sign in

Check your email

For your security, we need to re-authenticate you.

Click the link we sent to , or click here to sign in.

Kirsten Mortensen
May 2Liked by Todd Hargrove

I love this.

I have personally noticed a connection between posture and clarity of vision. Just laid my thoughts out in a blog post with a link to this substack, but the short version is: if the head is not aligned, the muscles that are attached to the eyeball have to compensate to enable light to strike the retina in a way that is most efficient / easy for the brain to process. The more strained and tight our eye muscles become, the more difficult it is for them to move fluidly.

My hunch is that this is one reason we're seeing an epidemic of myopia: we're indoors all the time, slumping and staring at screens, and our eye muscles are overworked in unnatural ways. https://kirstenmortensen.com/posture-and-eyesight-some-thoughts-about-natural-vision-and-myopia/

Expand full comment
ReplyGive giftCollapse
Judith Spancken
Feb 17Liked by Todd Hargrove

Thank you for this piece Todd. I found this hugely interesting and had not before seen this footage. This really is something I would like to explore more. I am an Alexander technique Trainee and the freedom of the neck is such a big aspect in the Alexander technique as well as the role of the eyes in leading movement. Your post together with the footage got me motivated to explore this in more detail...

Expand full comment
ReplyGive giftCollapse
1 more comments…
TopNewCommunity

No posts

Ready for more?

© 2022 Todd Hargrove
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Publish on Substack Get the app
Substack is the home for great writing