167: Why A NASCAR Driver Can Still Get Vertigo With Elite Medical Care

Vertigo sidelining Alex Bowman raises a bigger question: what do we miss when elite medical care still can’t deliver a fast, clear answer. I break down how the vestibular system gets overwhelmed in motorsports and why deeper performance testing can uncover hidden drivers behind symptoms. 
• why vertigo is more than dizziness and how the vestibular system, eyes, and brain sync 
• a simple one-foot balance test to feel sensory input in real time 
• first-line causes teams check such as BPPV, concussion history, vestibular nerve issues, and cervical spine alignment 
• motorsport stressors such as sustained G forces, heat stress, micro-traumas, and dehydration plus electrolyte ratios 
• hidden physiological drivers such as blood sugar instability, electrolyte imbalance, blood pressure dysregulation, nervous system overload, and chronic inflammation 
• environmental exposures in garages such as fuel, exhaust, brake dust, solvents, VOCs, and their long-term impact 
• why standard blood work can look normal while performance is off at the cellular level 
• deeper metrics such as hair mineral patterns, omega-3 to omega-6 ratios, CGM trends, and detox capacity 
If you're a driver, a crew member, or a team owner interested in performance physiology testing and optimization, you can learn more at victory lanewellness.com because champions don't guess, they test. 

Transcript

Alex Bowman And A Bigger Question

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Recently, NASCAR driver Alex Bowman had to step out of the car mid-race at Coda due to not feeling well, which is not unusual once in a while. But then he had to sit out at Phoenix due to being diagnosed with vertigo. Now, when something like that happens, especially at a team like Hendrick Motorsports, one thing is certain that access to elite medical care, it's not the issue. So when Vertigo still sidelines a driver, it raises a fascinating question. What are we missing? Today we're going to break down the physiology behind Vertigo in high performance environments and why it can be sometimes difficult to diagnose and how deeper performance testing can sometimes reveal hidden drivers. Hello, I'm Jeffrey Morta. If you're like most in NASCAR's top tiers, drivers, crews, owners, or executives, while you're busy chasing podiums, have you fully considered who's taking care of you? Right here, you're about to start transforming your mind and body for peak race day performance with high performance health, designed exclusively for the demands of NASCAR. As a certified high performance health coach and consulting hypnotist, I've coached elite entrepreneurs and athletes to higher energy, sharper focus, and greater resilience, naturally, safely, and backed by science. And right now, I'm bringing that same engineered approach to the best in motorsport. Here you'll find no wasted time, just a unique blend of integrative health, mental conditioning, and proven recovery strategies delivered in plain language that you can use right away. Imagine a season without burnout, brain fog, or the costly crash of your health. Because the truth is the real race starts within. I'm grateful you're here. Vertigo isn't just dizziness, it's the sensation that the world is spinning or moving when it shouldn't be. And at the center of this system is the vestibular apparatus in the inner ear, which works together with the brain, the eyes, the entire central nervous system to create the body sense of spatial awareness. And when these symptoms or systems, I should say, lose synchronization, vertigo appears. And a simple test, if you're in a safe place to do so, is to stand on only one foot. Pretty easy, right? Now, if you're standing on one foot, try closing your eyes. And as you may have just discovered, it's not as easy because you removed a crucial sensory input to the central nervous system, which is your vision. And in racing environments, those systems are under enormous stress. And you can check out last week's episode on redefining stress. That would be uh breaking boundaries, episode 166, I believe. And so the first thing, the first things that elite medical teams would check, uh, you know, we we talked about some of those things, and it's it's no surprise that at the professional level in a top organization like Hendrick Motorsports, the obvious causes are evaluated first. Things that include um something that's called uh BPPV, where calcium crystals inside the inner ear that give us our balance, they actually may shift per position. Um, something else that they'll obviously check, or I shouldn't say obviously, but uh concussion or head trauma, which Alex Bowman has had in the past, but was ruled out by his medical team in this particular situation. Uh, vestibular nerve dysfunction is something else that professional medical teams might look at. And of course, structural alignment issues in the cervical spine uh in particular, which Alex has suffered uh a broken back after a sprint series wreck in Iowa some years back. So these are the correct first steps. And in many cases, the problem is solved right there. But occasionally symptoms persist, and that's when things get interesting from a high performance health perspective. So let's touch on that racing environment and that vestibular system. Motorsports, it's no surprise, they in motorsports it pushes the human body in ways most sports do not. Drivers can experience sustained lateral G forces for hours. Uh, rapid head movement, although great advancements have been made in this department over the years in the cockpit of the race car, there are still spinal micro traumas that may be happening during the course of a race, as well as uh things like extreme heat stress, as we are we've already seen uh in the early season. And then, of course, significant dehydration risk, which is not just about drinking fluids, but getting the right electrolyte ratio actually into the cells. And all of these influence the vestibular system. Now imagine that system already under pressure from something else happening physiologically, and that's where deeper investigation can become very important. So let's dive into the hidden physiological drivers of vertigo. Sometimes vertigo, it's not purely an inner-ear issue, it can also be influenced by systemic physiology such as blood sugar instability. Now, they may or may not have checked Alex's blood sugar, electrolyte imbalance. We're gonna go deeper into that one because most likely they looked at it by one aspect, but not another. Blood pressure dysregulation. Now I'm sure they took his blood pressure uh once or twice, nervous system overload, conventional medicine really doesn't have a good way to test this. And chronic inflammation, they do look at uh inflammation markers, but we're gonna talk about that in just a moment as well. These factors can disrupt communication between the brain and the vestibular system. And for a high performance driver, even small physiological imbalances can show up as symptoms under stress. And for some, it may be brain fog or maybe fatigue, and for some, it may be vertigo. One important factor here is environmental stress inside motorsports. This is often overlooked. Uh, it's an often overlooked factor, very unique to the racing environments, because there is exposure to compounds most athletes never encounter. And week after week I'm noticing the more that I watch uh not only NASCAR, but the different motorsports. Uh, for instance, yesterday I was watching uh drag racing, and I noticed some environmental stress factors that they were definitely overlooking in that uh in that sport as well. So inside garages and track environments, you'll find things like raw fuel and exhaust vapors, tire smoke and track compound particles, uh, brake dust, solvents, volatile organic compounds, and so much more. And over time, these exposures can influence neurological function and metabolic balance, or I should say, imbalance. Many of today's top drivers have been exposed to these toxins since their teens, or in some cases since birth. I mean, so many drivers are having, you know, their families started right now, and we see their children, their babies being exposed to these toxins uh in the race environment, at the garage, on pit road, you know, obviously not during a race, but you know, there's a study that was done, oh, probably over 10 years ago, maybe 15 years ago, called the 10 Americans Study. And it was just done on 10 Americans, but the amount of toxins found in those 10 Americans was way more than what they expected to find. And some of those toxins, there's no way that these Americans could have been exposed to those toxins because the uh the 10 Americans were unborn children. And the toxins were found in the umbilical blood of these unborn children. And so that's showing that the women that are um creating these babies in inside of their bodies during these nine months have been exposed to toxins, and the 10 Americans, the unborn children, were exposed to the toxins that the mother was exposed to as well. Uh, so very, very significant. And you know, apply that to motorsports. And some of these race car drivers that are in their late teens or early 20s have been racing their entire lives and in around this environment, have been exposed to these toxins since before they were born. And again, this doesn't mean that these toxins are the cause in any specific case, but they are variables worth understanding in high performance environments. So let's touch on why standard blood work often misses the full story. One of the most important things to understand is that standard blood work is designed to detect disease and not necessarily to optimize performance. For example, electrolytes in blood are tightly regulated by the body when enough, well, I should say without enough magnesium, the body will actually pull calcium and phosphorus from the bones, making them brittle, is my point, to balance the blood, is the bigger point here. So blood levels can appear normal even when cellular mineral balance is off. Another example is inflammation markers like C-reactive protein, may look normal even when fatty acid balance is driving inflammatory signaling, which can affect the myelin sheath of the nerves leading to nervous system-based disorders. And of course, blood glucose may look fine in a snapshot test on Tuesday, but fluctuate significantly across the race weekend. And that's why deeper performance metrics can sometimes provide additional insight. In integrative high-performance physiology, we often look at metrics such as soft tissue mineral patterns. This is a three-month snapshot from using a hair sample, so that's the soft tissue, and it's giving us a three-month snapshot of mineral patterns, not only mineral patterns but uh ratios and also heavy metal toxicity, which plays a huge role in central nervous system regulation. Uh also, we look at omega-3 to omega-6 inflammatory ratios. Uh, we use things like uh continuous glucose monitoring trends to be able to evaluate uh situations in reference to blood sugar regulation. And then, of course, toxin exposure and detoxification capacity is a very important aspect of what we do for high performance health. These help create a systems-level view of the body rather than isolated uh snapshots. So the goal isn't guessing, the goal here is understanding the full performance picture. And I do have to say that as an integrative health practitioner and a high performance health coach, of course, we don't claim to diagnose, treat, or cure any disease. We don't provide any medical advice, but we always ask that deeper question. We keep asking why. And at our high performance health practice, Victory Lane Wellness, our philosophy is simple. When symptoms appear in high performance environments, we keep asking why until the underlying driver becomes clear. It's so frustrating to me when somebody gets an answer that, well, we don't know why, so we'll just have to monitor to see if things get progressively worse. Or we're gonna palliate these symptoms with a pharmaceutical so that uh, you know, you can go on with your daily life. You know, and in high performance health, what we do is we support the body with safe, natural, science-backed protocols designed and clinically proven to restore balance and optimize performance. Because the body, much like a race car, performs best when every system is properly tuned. So vertigo is a reminder that even elite athletes operating at the highest levels can encounter complex physiological challenges. The key here is curiosity, to ask better questions and to look deeper. And remember that human performance is ultimately biological performance. If you're a driver, a crew member, or a team owner interested in performance physiology testing and optimization, you can learn more at victory lanewellness.com because champions don't guess, they test. This is Breaking Boundaries for Champions, and I'm Jeffrey Mort, your personal high performance health coach. Until next time, stay healthy, stay focused, and keep pushing the limits of what's possible.