Taking a Blindfold off our Proprioception.
Proprioception simply put is knowing where you are in space. We all have it or we would fall over.
It is listed as our 6th sense. And like learning the piano, it is a trainable skill.
In this piece I’d like to put the spotlight on Pain as an influencer on our Proprioception. Pain is an obvious proprioceptive feeling. We will often adapt movement to avoid pain. We might learn to move in ways where we don’t “feel the pain”, a useful daily habit that can lead to creating blind spots in our proprioception. We have all fostered “blind spots” over our lifetime for various reasons.
“Great it’s a blind spot! It doesn’t cause me any pain either, so why change it?”.
A valid question. And of course – if there is no referred pain diving into your trauma and pain may not be a worthy past time.
(That is not my field, and not what I wanted to highlight.)
Let me take a more every day approach - someone who works at a “desk”. They do a repetitive task of typing for multiple hours a day. To be able to do their job it is necessary to ignore the shoulder tensions that holding this shape involve. For functional reasons they have made their shoulders a blind spot. Their ability to sense how much muscle force (tension) they need when they next go to lift something heavy isn’t available in a nuanced way.
The brain said heavy so the muscles recruited to 8 out of 10. (it may have only required a 5 out of 10.. or perhaps it required a 2nd person to lift…). This blind spot now leads to an overuse injury in their spine, (many of the shoulder muscles attach to the spine) . Now the job of this person, and their health professionals is muddied because the pain is in their spine, and their shoulders feel “fine” – because they are proprioceptively blind.
Why now is it useful for this person to become aware of their proprioceptive blind spots?
The most relevant example in a Pilates setting is – can you feel your core work? And can you adapt it’s tone to match the load it is under? (i.e. your core should tense differently for a plank than a single leg float lying down).
Maybe your core is one of your blind spots, as a woman let me throw some reasons out that you have blocked this area out of your awareness – body image concerns, eating disorders, menstrual or birthing pain / issues, and then lets not forget that our core wraps around the “gut brain”. Blocking out “that sinking feeling” is a coping mechanism that layers into our Proprioception.
Bodies are amazing and fascinating. Way more than we can unpack every class.
Take a moment now to stand up, close your eyes and notice the parts of your body that you can hear – the loud ones… the quiet ones… and then listen a bit longer… what are the parts you can’t feel at all. Maybe you can put them in focus for a few classes and listen to how they would like to interact with your body’s movements.
If you’d like to read more on Proprioception see these earlier pieces by Tahmour.
Mindful Proprioception and Pilates