Dennis Bartram Consultation Active Balance Courses Vestibular Reflex Adaptation: Injury Starts Here
You want to know the truth? The pain you keep chasing isn’t the villain. The stiff shoulder, the ankle that’s “always been off,” the sacroiliac that cracks like a pepper grinder, those aren’t broken systems. They’re adaptations. They’re your body doing its damned best to stay upright in a world that keeps knocking it off-kilter.
Last Tuesday, I watched a man struggle to stand from the therapy table. His back didn’t hurt when he walked, it hurt when he stopped. That’s not wear and tear. That’s the vestibular reflex adaptation kicking in. His body wasn’t malfunctioning, it was bracing for a ship that wasn’t rocking anymore.
Let me explain.
The Reality of Vestibular Reflex Adaptation Injury
It Starts in the Ear-But Lives in the Spine
Tucked deep in your ear is a gyroscopic system that orients you to gravity. It’s why you don’t fall over when you close your eyes. It’s also the reason old injuries don’t just go away-they get embedded into how your body balances itself.
We call it the vestibular reflex mechanism, and it’s smarter than any therapist. When it detects instability, be it a sprained ankle, a twisted sacrum, or even long-term visual misalignment, it adapts. Fast. Quietly. Permanently.
You don’t feel the shift right away. But your gait changes. Your core recruits wrong. Your flexors and extensors fire out of sync. And one day, maybe ten years after that bike crash, you wonder why your hip “just won’t stay right.”
–Neuroplasticity-The Brain’s Dirty Fix
Your brain doesn’t delete old input. It reroutes. It rewires. That’s neuroplasticity. And it’s both your saviour and your saboteur.
Instead of returning your body to true balance, it normalises the adaptive pattern. It creates a new normal-even if that normal is misaligned, inefficient, or painful.
And here’s the kicker: it holds onto that adaptation until you clear it. Don’t stretch it. Don’t click it. Clear it.
Why Vestibular Reflexes Need Ongoing Attention
What Pain Is Actually Telling You
Pain is not failure. Pain is an update. It’s your body telling you, “This adaptation worked once. Now it’s in the way.”
What makes this trickier is that you can be pain-free and still be out of alignment. Until you address the input loop-vestibular, ocular, and structural-you’re just rearranging deck chairs on a slowly tipping ship.
That’s why chiropractors can give you relief, but it rarely lasts. It’s not their fault. They’re adjusting an outcome, not the origin.
H3: The SI Joint-More Than Just A Click
The sacroiliac joint is the primary site for adaptation. In a quadruped like a dog or horse, that joint doesn’t move the same way. But in us, it’s a vertical tension point. When it slips—even microscopically-it throws off the entire kinetic chain.
Clicking it back into place? Useful. But without clearing the vestibular driver that caused the tension in the first place, it’s only temporary.
And here’s where we get radical: we don’t fix the joint. We fix the adaptive message that’s keeping it out of place.
Balancing the Reflex System With Structural Input
Ship Compass vs. Skateboard
Imagine a ship’s gimbal compass. The sea tips, the compass stays steady. That’s your vestibular system.
Now imagine your ankle has a matching compass-one in the subtalar joint. Twist your foot once, and the message to your brain changes.
And that message? It never got reset. So your eyes, your hips, your spine-they’ve all been adjusting to a lie ever since.
You’re not misaligned. You’re too well aligned to the wrong thing.
H3: Adaptation ≠ Efficiency
Don’t confuse balance with efficiency. A body can be brilliantly balanced around dysfunction.
Ever seen someone with a limp who moves like it’s normal? That’s a perfected adaptation. Their body no longer sees it as a problem-it’s the plan.
But it’s robbing them of energy, mobility, and longevity.
H3: Clearing vs. Treating
Here’s what we do differently:
We don’t treat the symptom.
We clear the adaptation.
That means identifying the original message, often from years ago, that told the brain to shift.
Then we reset the system: vestibular, ocular, structural.
The result? The pain does not go away because we treated it… but because it was no longer needed.
Future-Proofing the Body Through System Reset
Movement From Head to Toes
You don’t lift with your arm. You lift with your head, your spine, your feet.
Denni Bartram teaches how the flexor and extensor chains can be activated by dropping the head or lifting it. He shows how a whole-body movement restores primal reflexes. It’s not technique. It’s a system reboot.
Like crawling. Like balance on a skateboard. Like moving the entire self from a single shift.
When Balance Returns, Pain Leaves
You know that feeling when you step off a boat and the world rocks for hours? That’s your vestibular system slowly recalibrating.
Now imagine that same recalibration, but after clearing 20 years of spinal compensation.
You don’t just feel better. You feel free.
That’s what happens when balance returns. The pain was just a signal. Once the signal’s no longer needed, it stops.
Vestibular Reflex Adaptation Injury: Fix the Root
People think pain is a failure, that it means something’s broken. But what if that tight hip or dodgy ankle isn’t broken at all? What if it’s your body doing exactly what it was trained to do… to survive?
Let me tell you something blunt: your body doesn’t make mistakes, it makes adaptations. That limp? That nerve pain? That shoulder you’ve had worked on six times? They’re all part of a brilliant, reflex-driven compensation strategy.
The real problem? The adaptation stuck.
And unless you clear the original cause, not treat it, not stretch it, not click it, you’re just putting a plaster over a leaking valve.
The Truth About Vestibular Reflex Adaptation
Your Balance System is Smarter Than You
Deep inside your inner ear is a system called the vestibular reflex system, a built-in gyroscope that helps keep you upright, balanced, and moving. It constantly communicates with your eyes, spine, and ankle joints, helping your brain determine where “up” is and how to react when that “up” is compromised.
Break that loop, through injury, vision imbalance, or a sprained ankle that never quite healed, and your brain starts adapting. It reroutes tension, locks down joints, and tightens certain muscles. It rewires balance through the spindle cells and ligaments, and boom — you’ve got a body that still walks… just not how it should.
Neuroplasticity: The Blessing That Becomes a Curse
Neuroplasticity refers to the ability of the nervous system to change. That’s good when you’re recovering. It’s bad when your body decides the limp is “normal” and keeps reinforcing it.
Over time, your new normal becomes a web of locked-down movement patterns, constantly fed by nociceptive messages. These messages don’t shut off. They keep flooding your system, making the body reinforce the same pattern, again and again, until your bones grind and your joints ache.
And still, the body thinks it’s helping.
Sacroiliac Dysfunction: The Canary in the Coal Mine
Why That Joint Goes Out Over and Over
Let’s talk about the sacroiliac joint. It’s the base of your spine and the hub of human uprightness. For most people with recurring pain, this joint becomes the fall guy.
You lift something. You step wrong. Boom, the SI joint “goes.”
But why?
Because it’s the endpoint of a chain reaction, one that started with an unhealed ankle, a twisted pelvis, or even faulty eye movement.
Chiropractors can realign it. And yes, it might help… temporarily. But if you don’t clear the vestibular adaptation driving the misalignment, it’s like painting over rust. You haven’t fixed the cause — you’ve just muted the alarm.
The Body Doesn’t Forget – And That’s the Problem
Injury Memory is Real – But It’s Not in the Mind
People joke about “muscle memory,” but what they don’t realise is: your entire nervous system remembers trauma. Not emotionally; physically.
Take a child who falls off a bike at 8. Twists an ankle. Healed in a week. But 20 years later, he gardens for an hour, and his lower back locks up. That’s not bad luck. That’s the vestibular system protecting a pattern that never got reset.
The foot still reads the floor differently. The hip loads unevenly. The brain compensates. And one day, bang, the system can’t hold it anymore.
This isn’t theory. This is what I see in the clinic every week.
Treating vs. Clearing: A Radical Shift in Practice
Most Treatment Fails Because It’s Too Local
Here’s the brutal truth: most treatment is still too mechanical. Too “local.”
Chiropractors adjust the spine. Physios stretch the hamstrings. Osteopaths work on the fascia.
But they rarely ask: Why is that tight in the first place? Why does this keep coming back?
What’s needed isn’t a better technique. It’s better logic. We need to stop treating symptoms and start decoding the reflex arcs that control movement and tension.
The Dennis Bartram Approach
My method? We reset the system.
We don’t start with the pain. We trace the balance fault that created the adaptation. Often that’s:
- An old ankle sprain
- A dominant eye imbalance
- A misfiring vestibular reflex
- A pelvis frozen in fight mode
We work through gaze reorientation, subtalar joint reintegration, and whole-body priming. We don’t stretch, we rewire.
And when the pattern clears, something wild happens:
The joint that “always hurt” no longer does.
Real People, Real Change: A Clinic Story
Let me tell you about Mick, a retired builder in his 60s. Came in hunched over, hips locked, and convinced his knees were “shot.”
He’d had injections. Two surgeries. He was told he needed a replacement.
First thing I noticed? His ankles weren’t talking to his eyes. His gait was in survival mode. His left SI joint was jammed up, but that was the result, not the cause.
We did 20 minutes of vestibular and visual reflex resets. Worked the subtalar. Cleared the shoulder tension pattern that was reinforcing the gait.
He stood up straighter than he had in ten years. Said it felt like his body “was finally listening again.”
Not magic. Not a miracle. Just biology, applied properly.
H2: Final Thought: Your Body Knows How to Heal, If You Let It
Your body’s not broken. It’s just been doing its job for too long without new input.
Pain is the language your system speaks when it’s out of options. However, when you reset the reflex loops, the balance system, gaze, and ground contact, you give it new options.
That’s when healing happens. Not from the outside in. But from the inside out.
I’m not here to sell you hope. I’m here to remind you: your nervous system already has the answers. You’ve just never been taught to listen.
📸 Author & Media Info
- Author: Dennis Bartram Consultation
- Bio: Somatic coach, reflex integration specialist, and co-creator of Beyond Combat. 40 years of clinical work helping people unstick what they didn’t know was stuck.
- Image:
dennis-bartram-portrait.jpg - Alt text: Dennis Bartram – Reflex Movement Specialist
