What is Proprioception?

Chances are that you have never heard of the term "proprioception". What is it and why is it important to you?

Proprioception is your ability to sense the position, location, orientation and movement of your body and its parts - such as your arms, legs, hands, feet, etc. This is accomplished through the interconnected nature of your central nervous system (brain, spine and nerves) with sensory receptors located throughout the body (known as "mechanoreceptors") in your muscles, tendons and joints. Proprioception is related to muscle memory and hand-eye coordination.

Just as we can train for improved strength, endurance or power, we can train to improve our proprioception. In fact, enhancing your proprioception can help with your training for those goals of improved strength, endurance or power. How exactly do we train to enhance our proprioception? This involves exercises that challenge us to build our internal balance and stabilization. In order to achieve this, the exercise is done in a "proprioceptively enriched environment" - defined by NASM as an unstable, yet controllable physical situation. What does this mean? I'll give you an example for training your chest (pectoral) muscles - a common exercise that is done for chest is a bench press. For the standard bench press, you lie on a flat, stable bench and use a barbell for weight resistance. To change this to a proprioceptively enriched environment, we could replace the flat bench with a stability ball and replace the barbell with dumbbells. These alterations make the exercise conditions more "unstable" - you will have to utilize your balance and stabilizing muscles throughout the exercise. The exercise is still done in a controllable manner - you would use a lighter weight than what you would use with a standard bench press, so that you can safely perform the exercise.

Overall, training to enhance your proprioception will help you along your path to achieving your fitness goals, whether that includes increased strength, muscle mass, endurance and/or power. Incorporating exercises performed in a proprioceptively enriched environment will also assist with improving your balance and stability.