Waff was actually engineered with this in mind and can help you further tap in or amplify all four types of perception to drive your health, fitness, wellbeing, and performance.
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Your nervous system (smarter than any computer) is constantly taking in information about your environment, your body’s internal state, and more all while helping you make the best decisions possible to navigate your life.
This is true of both fitness and athletic environments as well as how we navigate our way through life.
Waff was actually engineered with this in mind and can help you further tap in or amplify all four types of perception to drive your health, fitness, wellbeing, and performance.
The first type of perception is known as neuroception. Neuroception is what helps us identify danger in our environment. This is a subconscious scanning system that is always at the ready, patiently waiting for any sense of danger. This threat detection system can kick in if it deems something in our environments can harm us.
WAFF actually helps taps into this in two ways. First, the various WAFF designs—especially the WAFF Max—helps us relax from potentially dysfunctional neuroceptive abilities.
You see, sometimes modern life can see us get stuck in chronically stressed states and our neuroception can be sounding false alarm bells all the time. This is mentally and emotionally taxing while also drains our precious energy.
By simply laying on the WAFF Max when we’re stressed, we’re able to provide our nervous system with a state of peace and calmness to shut off potentially overactive threat detection systems.
You see, our brain in some aspects is lazy. It wants you to be able to go from point A to point B while conserving as much energy resources as possible to allocate to other more important functions (e.g. hormone manufacture, immune function, and more). By simply standing on say a WAFF Mini, we’re able to tap into this “danger” response. The unpredictability of the WAFF’s reactive surface makes our nervous system recruit more of our sensory systems inc. more muscle and fascial tissue to get the movement task done.
We want this type of deeper, more complete activation at the ready for our favorite activities, enhancing our fitness level, preventing injury, as well as in sports.
Exteroception is our sense of stimuli outside the body. This includes our senses of smell, hearing, and vision. This is what most people commonly associate perception or our senses as.
In this context, WAFF has the ability to develop our exteroception abilities, too. We’ve often said there are limitless ways to progress your exercise routine with WAFF and one of them is by including ocular-motor drills for our vestibular system.
In simple terms, this means that you can intentionally look to one corner of your field of vision, turn your head, track items (say catching tennis balls) and more while balancing on a WAFF. This is known as dualtasking (or multitasking) and helps train your exteroceptive abilities.
This is important as our vision can decline similar to an unworked muscle with age. Furthermore, our exteroception also has a role in choosing the appropriate level of muscle tone when walking, running, or jumping in our environment.
Thus, healthy exteroceptive abilities are essential for injury prevention (e.g. preventing falls in active aging adults), as well as performance.
Proprioception is what most commonly gets associated with WAFF training and rightfully so. Proprioception refers to our sensory ability to have awareness of our body. A type of proprioception known as kinesthetic awareness is this same quality only while moving through space and time.
This helps improve our motor control and coordination we need to maintain healthy posture, movement, and to be able to perform in any activity.
These proprioceptive sensors act as a GPS and are located all over our body, including in our hands, feet, connective tissues, fascia, skin, and more.
By sitting, standing, or otherwise applying some level of weight distribution onto a WAFF, we’re able to amplify these internal sensations so that we’re better able to stand upright, improve our movement, activate the appropriate tissues to complete a task, and beyond.
Interoception is the sense of the internal state of the body as defined by trauma therapist and applied neurologist, Magdalena Weinstein.
This sensory functionality governs regulatory patterns to balance out organ function, including heart, lungs, digestion, and more. At some level, one already knows this without having any type of scientific background. Think back to having poor digestion during times of stress.
By simply sitting on a WAFF Mini during your day and especially by laying on a WAFF Max, we’re better able to train something called interoceptive totality—the body’s ability to integrate/feel, align, and balance all of our internal & external mechanisms.
The kinesthetic sensory feedback offered by WAFF helps bring us into alignment from a sensory perspective so we can be healthy and simply feel good day to day.
Put another way, WAFF helps you feel the flow and connect yourself.Takeaways
The birds-eye view here is that WAFF can help you tap into and develop just about all aspects of your sensory systems to improve your health, wellbeing, physical fitness, resilience, and performance.
Remember that your sensory systems in many ways determine how you take in and show up in the world. It’s important to take care of them so they can take care of you.
