What is Proprioception?
How your body senses movement, location and action.
Proprioception is your body's ability to sense movement, action, and location.
It’s the reason why you can walk without being conscious of where we need to put your foot next; the reason you can catch your balance when you trip over something on the ground; the reason why you can touch your elbow with your eyes shut.
When walking proprioception kicks in when your foot senses a small deviation in the even surface of the ground like a rock or a hole, and to prevent injury your body makes an adjustment to stabilize the foot and ankle in response to the feedback picked up by the proprioceptors in your lower limbs.
Proprioceptors are sensory receptors everywhere in your body that guide your movement - both conscious and unconscious.
The majority are located in your muscles, joints, and tendons continually assessing your body’s position and movement, sense of tension or force, effort, and balance.
Proprioceptive sensations are like shadows that you can’t see and aren’t associated with specific, recognizable sensations. Even with your eyes shut they enable you to still sense with some accuracy where your limbs are positioned and if they’re moving or stationary.
Simply put, when you move the receptors in your limbs and trunk send detailed messages to your brain about where your body is positioned and what actions it’s taking. Your brain processes these messages and works with your eyes, nervous system, and vestibular system (inner ear), to generate your perception of where your body is and how it's moving.
The proprioceptors located within your muscles also allow you to get comfortable in unnatural positions.
They sense changes in muscle length so when a muscle is chronically contracted (tight), our proprioception adjusts so that you feel the muscle is not as short or tight as it actually is. So the increased level of contraction in our muscles actually begins to feel normal, leading to muscle memory.
When you regularly repeat a movement such as sitting at a computer day after day, your brain learns to keep you in a slouched posture by keeping your abdominal and pectoral muscles contracted. Your proprioceptive and vestibular systems allow you to get more and more comfortable in this unnatural position. Slouching forward begins to feel normal and even good and sitting up straight takes effort and feels unnatural. We typically remain blissfully unaware of this subconscious adaptation until one day, it can finally cause pain.
Practicing Clinical Somatics enables you to actively retrain your posture and proprioception by releasing chronically tight muscles with pandiculation.