How Strength Training Can Reduce Chronic Dizziness And Help You Get Your Life Back

Chronic dizziness is a feeling of unsteadiness or wooziness that persists for more than a few days. Sometimes it’s caused by a physical problem in the inner ear, side effects of medication, infection, or an underlying health condition.

Sometimes, though, people with chronic dizziness don’t have a physical impairment. Everything in your body seems fine, all the tests come back negative, but you still experience long-term dizziness that impacts your quality of life. You might be diagnosed with PPPD or a similar condition.

In those cases, it seems that there’s a problem with the way your sensory processing systems are working. The dizziness, fogginess, and other symptoms are sometimes called “neural circuit symptoms” because the issue stems from the way your nervous system (which is made up of many neural circuits) is communicating and responding to information.

If you have these symptoms, please see your doctor. There are some common treatments for PPPD and other neural circuit symptoms, including vestibular rehabilitation, talk therapy, and medications.

But one of the most underrated and effective treatments is one you might not expect: strength training.

How Strength Training Can Reduce Chronic Dizziness Symptoms

The main parts of the nervous system that aren’t working properly in neural circuit symptoms are your proprioceptive system and your stress response system.

Your Proprioceptive System

Proprioception is your sense of where your body is in space. The proprioceptive system is a collection of sensors in your skin, your muscles, connective tissues, and joints, that send information to your brain.

Simone Biles, greatest gymnast of all time, has great proprioception. She subconsciously knows exactly where her body and limbs are, which way they’re moving, and where they need to be.

Sometimes, your proprioceptive system stops working the way it should. It doesn’t collect accurate information from the sensors in your body, or it doesn’t communicate that information to your brain clearly.

This is probably what happened when Simone Biles’s experienced the “twisties” at the 2020 Olympics and had to pull out of her events.

It’s not clear why that system sometimes starts having issues. It might be an illness or injury, a traumatic event, or stress. Often, after the event that caused the issue has passed, the system corrects itself and starts working again. But in the case of chronic dizziness, it doesn’t. This is where strength training can help.

Strength training is excellent at improving proprioception.

During exercise, your brain is sending signals out to control your movement. It’s telling each muscle when and how hard to contract. At the same time, your brain is receiving signals back from your proprioceptive system. It’s sensing the positions of your limbs in space so it can create the exact right amount of force to get the weights in the right position.

During a dumbbell chest press, for example, you push the weights up over your chest and then bring them towards each other so they almost touch at the top. Too much force and you’ll accidentally smash the weights into each other. Too little force and they won’t get all the way to the top. Your proprioceptive system and brain have to communicate well with each other for you to do this exercise.

Every time you change exercises, adjust the weights, or change your body position, your proprioceptive system has to figure out how to complete the movement.

In other words, strength training challenges the proprioceptive system.

The more you challenge your proprioceptive system, the better it works. The more you strength train, the stronger and more efficient your proprioception becomes.

Your Stress Response System

Your stress response system is the part of your brain and body that responds to threats, whether those threats are physical or mental. It responds by creating the so-called “fight or flight response”, preparing your body to take action to get you out of danger.

That response includes body sensations like heavy breathing, increased heart rate, tightness in your muscles, and changes in your thinking and attention.

With neural circuit symptoms and chronic dizziness, your stress response system is often overactive or overreactive. It essentially “sounds the alarm” when it doesn’t need to. That can cause or worsen your symptoms.

Let’s say you’re standing still and for some reason your proprioceptive system doesn’t send the right information to your brain about your position in space. Suddenly your brain thinks “uh oh, I don’t know where I am right now.”

If you stay relaxed, your brain will probably be able to figure out what’s going on. You might feel a little unsteady, but it goes away quickly as your brain adjusts. Or you don’t even notice symptoms at all.

If instead your brain thinks “uh oh, I don’t know where I am right now” and your stress system goes into overdrive, suddenly your heart starts beating fast and your breathing gets heavier. You get into a cycle of fear and stress that exacerbates what you’re feeling. You go into fight or flight mode even though you’re just standing still and not actually in any danger.

This stress response is not in your control. You’re not trying to overreact, your stress system does it on its own. But you can train it to stop overreacting. How? You guessed it… strength training.

Training Your Stress System

Your stress response is controlled by a system in your brain and body called your hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, or the HPA axis. The HPA axis sends signals throughout your body to mobilize the resources you need to respond to a stressful or threatening situation.

The resources that will help if you need to fight or flee are oxygen and nutrients that your muscles can use to make fuel, so you can move and take action. You also need increased focus and decision-making so you can make the right moves at the right time.

Your stress system gets those nutrients where they need to go by increasing your heart rate and breathing, sending more sugar and fat to your muscles, and ramping up brain activation and communication between brain cells.

This fight or flight response and the changes in your brain and body that come with it are what happens during any type of threat or stress, even if the stress is mental or emotional and not physical. Our brains and bodies don’t really know the difference.

These are the exact same responses that you get when you strength train. Your muscles need more fuel to lift the weights. Your brain needs to be able, with the help of your proprioceptive system, to direct your movements the right way.

That’s why you feel your heart beating faster and you start breathing harder, and it’s why there are improvements in brain function during and after a workout.

Exercise, as opposed to most other types of stress, also releases hormones and neurochemicals that help you recover from that stress afterwards. That means you adapt, grow, and get fitter and healthier. This is why exercise is considered to be a “good stress.”

You can think of strength training as a practice session for dealing with stress. The more you practice, the more you train that system to work efficiently and effectively.

Getting Your Stress System Out Of “Danger Mode”

You want your stress response system to be working well and be ready to respond to threats. But with neural circuit symptoms (and also anxiety), your stress system is often working too hard.

It can be hypervigilant, stuck in danger mode and always searching for threats. It can be overreactive, sounding the alarm in response to something that’s not actually a serious threat.

It’s the combination of a stress system stuck in danger mode and a faulty proprioceptive system that keeps chronic dizziness going.

The practice sessions you get during exercise train your stress response system not to overreact. It learns how to do just what it needs to do, but not go overboard.

Your stress response system gets better at sensing exactly what resources are actually needed and responding with the right amount. It’ll get better at increasing your heart rate to the right level and releasing just the right amount of hormones and neurotransmitters, but not too much.

Why Strength Training Works Better Than Other Types Of Exercise For Reducing Chronic Dizziness

The term “strength training” is often used interchangeably with other types of resistance training. I’ll admit, I often say strength training when I mean general resistance training, but it’s actually a specific type of resistance training using relatively heavy weights.

For true strength training, you use a weight that makes it very challenging to complete between 2-6 repetitions.

If you’re lifting weights that allow you to complete more than 6 reps, you’re doing a different type of resistance training, usually hypertrophy training to build muscle size or muscular endurance training to make your muscles more fatigue-resistant. Those are great, but they’re not quite the same as strength training.

Many types of exercise, including cardio and all types of resistance training, can train your stress response system.

But strength training does something that most other kinds of exercise don’t. It specifically trains your nervous system.

I’ve written previously about the fact that strength mostly comes from your brain and nervous system, you can learn more about that in my full article on How Strength Works.

When you lift heavy weights to improve your strength, you’re not just training your muscles. You’re strengthening the way your brain and nerves process and communicate information.

That information processing and communication is important for a healthy proprioceptive system and an efficient stress response system, because they’re both part of your nervous system.

The Bottom Line

If you’re struggling with chronic dizziness that doesn’t have a physical cause, the problem might be in your nervous system. Specifically, your proprioceptive system might not be giving your brain accurate information, and your stress response system might be overreacting when your brain isn’t sure where your body is in space.

Try strength training. Along with all the other great benefits you’ll get, you’ll make your nervous system, proprioceptive system, and stress response system work better. That can decrease your symptoms and improve your life.

If You Need Help

If you want to get started with strength training specifically to combat chronic dizziness and other neural circuit symptoms, I have some resources for you.

To learn more about this topic, here is my interview with Dr. Yonit Arthur, an expert in chronic dizziness: Strength Training and Exercise For Chronic Dizziness and Symptom Recovery

Dr. Arthur and I filmed two free workouts and an FAQ video:

Workout A For Neural Circuit Dizziness and Other Symptoms

Workout B For Neural Circuit Dizziness and Other Symptoms

Frequently Asked Questions About Strength Training For Neural Circuit Symptoms

I’ve also developed a 12-week program specifically designed to improve neural circuit symptoms and chronic dizziness. It’s guided by an app and includes a detailed eBook, weekly video lessons, and worksheets to help you get the best benefits.

Finally, I also offer one-on-one coaching both in person and virtually. Schedule a free consultation to find out how we can work together.