Can You Touch A Coin?

Try this little experiment. Place a coin on the floor. Stand about 6 inches away from the coin. With your eyes open, attempt to touch the coin with your big toe (it doesn’t matter which foot). Now close your eyes and try it again.

If your ‘proprioception’ is in tune, then you should be able to touch the coin or at least get very close to it. However, if your proprioception is not functioning at a high level, then you will miss it by miles. The more times you repeat the same movement pattern the better it is ingrained on your nerve endings and you’ll soon find you can hit the coin each time even with your eyes closed.

So what is ‘proprioception’? Why is it important, and how do we train it?

Proprioception can be defined as “ an unconscious perception of movement and spatial orientation arising from stimuli within the body itself.”

Balance is not an example of proprioception. Balance control comes from the inner ear and not the body senses. However, the balance systems are intertwined heavily with the proprioceptive systems. If you’ve been at Get Fit NH Bootcamp for a while then you’ve played our warm up game “Get up and balance” This warm up is an example of how balance and proprioception are related.

Common examples from everyday life:

• Walking in a dark room in the middle of the night
• Catching a ball
• Eating whilst reading the paper

Where does proprioception come from?

Our muscles, ligaments and tendons are filled with nerve endings and receptors that allow us to perceive where our limbs are in space. These receptors send messages to our central nervous system (CNS) and the CNS in turn relays information to the brain. This information is compared to the information received from the eyes and ears, which in turn allows us to co-ordinate hand/foot-eye coordination as well as balance.

Why do people have poor proprioception?

The two  main groups that suffer from poor propioception are the injured/ill and the elderly. With any injury, the damage tissue alters the pain mechanisms that feed our brains. The messages tend to ‘fog’ up the nerve cells in the brain so that we don’t have such a defined sense of position anymore. Injuries to the knees or ankle tend to make us feel unstable. The elderly have ageing nerve endings and their nerves do not conduct information as effectively as younger people. They have more trouble with activities requiring body awareness and as a result often bump themselves easily and falls can result.

Can we improve our proprioception?

Absolutely! Proprioception can always be improved through training. The learning of any new skill involves training our proprioceptive sense and re-organizing the nervous system to suit the new activity. The nerve endings and sensory fibers in our muscles, ligaments and tendons become more effective at picking up changes in body position. In turn, the nerves become more efficient at transmitting the information to the brain, and the brain becomes better at responding to this information.

Practice, Practice, Practice is training our proprioception. Learning a new exercise and training our bodies to perform it will increase the use of that nervous system pathway. That is one reason it is so important to perform a movement pattern correctly from the start. We are training our muscles which are taking their cue from the nervous system. New movements will keep our brains working and increase our proprioception.

Proprioception is a fancy word but knowing we are keeping our body fit along with our brain is a great reason to practice this word literally over and over.

To your health,

Coach Nancy