Where am I?

“Where am I?” This question may trigger images of a lost child or young animal, afraid and in search of his mother, but did you know this question is also one that your mind poses to your body constantly? Similar to the child who has wandered away from his parents, our mind desires to know where our body is in order to feel safe and secure. On a larger, full-body scale, not knowing where we are is incredibly distressing (usually at the subconscious level), and these feelings of distress can engage our sympathetic nervous system and result in a low level of constant “background” stress for our body to deal with. On a more specific level, keeping track of our joint position helps us with balance, enhances our performance and prevents injury. To start, we’ll look at this more specific level. 

Proprioception is our ability to keep tabs on where our body is in the world. We have little sensors in all of our muscles, joints and connective tissues which provide our brain with constant feedback about what position we are in and where we are in relation to our brain. Dedicated “highways" in our nerves and spinal cord exist for this information to travel from the body to the cerebellum (the zone in our brain responsible for balance and coordination) at both the conscious and subconscious levels. Disruptions to this feedback result in a reduced functional capacity and trigger various responses and/or symptoms depending on the level of disruption. Some examples include trouble with balance, recurring joint sprains, navigating in the dark, and feeling dizzy. Improving the communication between our body and brain allows us to function at our best and (hopefully) avoid some injuries. To understand a little bit about how these sensors work, try this exercise: Close your eyes and bend one of your elbows. You can appreciate that even though you can’t see that one of your arms is bent, you know it is. That’s thanks to your proprioceptors. When your elbow is bent, one side of the joint capsule and surrounding tissues are stretched and the other side is compressed. By combining this information with the information from our shoulder joint, wrist and hand, we can have a pretty good idea of the exact position of our arm - we can’t see it, but we can “sense” it. We also know which arm is bent and which is straight by combing the feedback from both sides of the body. Pretty cool stuff hey? I tell ya, we gotta give our body more credit - it is a pretty complex fine oiled beast! So what happens when things don’t go quite as planned and we end up with a sprained ankle? 

When we sprain any joint in our body we have moved that joint beyond its normal range of motion to such an extreme that tissue damage occurs. We then experience pain, swelling and perhaps bruising as the body initiates a cascade of responses designed to bring healing (and our attention) to the area. In order for this injury to have happened, we lacked the ability to respond to our proprioceptors in our joint as it moved beyond its normal range. Either the rate of movement was too rapid for us to have a chance to respond to the information that was telling us the joint was moving closer and closer to the danger zone, or the amount of force/load that was applied to the joint was too much for our ability to correct the position. Once that joint capsule and surrounding tissues have been overstretched and damaged, our proprioceptors don’t function as well. Consider an elastic band. When it’s new, we stretch it and it recoils back and we can stretch it and release it over and over again, feeling the tension of the band increase as it expands. If we stretch it too far, or hold it stretched for too long, it ends up getting kinda saggy and doesn’t recoil. We can then stretch it much further than we used to before we feel the resistance of the band. Our proprioceptors in our joint capsules and ligaments work about the same way. Once they’ve been injured, we can stretch them quite a long way before they will send that message of tension up to the brain. That’s bad news, because by that time, we’ve already moved the joint too far and we’re back into the danger zone for more damage to occur. To help mitigate this factor, sometimes when we’re just returning to activity, we use aids like braces, tape or tensor bandages. While these do provide a little bit of support, their real magic happens by helping us turn up the volume of our proprioception in the injured area. As we feel the tape stretch and pull on our skin, or the pressure against a brace, we can respond to that feedback and correct our position - before we end up hurting ourselves again. Doing exercises and getting treatments done to help the tissues heal and the injury recover is important, but we can’t forget to retrain our proprioceptors too. Doing some exercises for this system helps prevent the dreaded “recurring ankle sprains” that keep many people out of activity at least once or twice every year or two. This rule applies to every joint in the body - not just our ankles, but they are easy for most of us to relate to. We’ll look at some other ones next time. 

So what to do if you need to retrain these little sensors? Balance exercises are key! We should be able to balance on one foot for at least 10 seconds (without having to rescue ourselves by putting the other foot down). Practice doing that until it’s easy - and work your way up to 30 seconds. You’ll notice all the little tiny “micro-movements” that your foot makes as you maintain your balance - that’s our body responding to our proprioceptors, making adjustments to ensure we stay upright. Once you can do this, up the anti by doing it with your eyes closed. With our vision removed, we have to rely solely on our joint receptors for feedback. If it’s too hard to start on one foot and you can’t balance at all, don’t be discouraged, you can try standing in a tandem stance with one leg in front of the other, slowly narrowing your stance as you improve. 

Once you’ve got the basics down and your body starts learning to pay better attention to this system, you can supercharge your exercise routine by combining balance with strength training. Many general upper and lower body strengthening exercises (for example, squats, shoulder press, biceps and triceps etc) can be done on a slightly unstable surface like a wobble board, “Bosu” ball or even a pillow. Just be careful you can maintain good form throughout the movement so you don’t end up injuring something else. This allows you to increase strength and work on your proprioceptive system at the same time, ensuring that the benefits you gain in a controlled training environment will better transfer to your performance when you’re out in our unpredictable world!

Stay tuned, next time we’ll look at the importance of that general nervous system level of proprioception that I mentioned at the beginning. Until then, happy balancing!