The Power Of Proprioception

This is episode is all about proprioception - what is is, why it's important, and how our Pilates practice can help it improve. Tune in!

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Transcript

0:09

Hello. Hello everybody. Welcome and welcome back to Pilates Students' Manual, helping you get the most out of your Pilates classes. I'm Olivia. Remember, you get the latest updates about everything I'm working on by joining the community on Buy Me a Coffee. That site is buymeacoffee.com/OliviaPodcasts. And you can also follow along with my journey on Instagram at @PilatesStudentsManual.

Pilates Teachers' Manual: 0:36

The Book is now available for purchase as an EPUB and PDF directly from me and on Kindle, available for purchase on Amazon. You can purchase it and other podcast merch at shop.OliviaBioni.com, and you can convert that EPUB or PDF version of my book into a Kindle friendly file by visiting amazon.com/sendtokindle. Today's episode is about something I think is really special about Pilates, which is developing a mind body connection, specifically, developing our proprioception, which is how we know where we are in space. A mind body connection is kind of general, so I'll discuss that briefly, but then I wanna get specific about proprioception because there are many forms of exercise that can create a degree of mind body awareness, like yoga, which is probably why yoga and Pilates get confused so often. Tai Chi or Qigong, even types of meditation. You may experience it during a repetitive exercise like running or swimming, where a mind body connection is sort of, you are moving intentionally. You're thinking about how you're moving. You're building a little bit of a brain body map of your movements. That can happen lots of ways. Proprioception is a bit more specific. It's our body's ability to know where we are in space without seeing where we are in space with our eyes. You can experience proprioception by closing your eyes and trying to touch the tip of your nose with your index finger. How do you know where your nose is? How do you know where your finger is? How do you know how much to move your finger to get it to your nose? All of that calculation that our brain is doing is proprioception. It's actually incredibly complicated and we take it for granted, even though we use it all the time. Good proprioception helps us with our balance with adapting to unexpected movements or terrain and with our coordination, where coordination is our ability to move smoothly and efficiently. We have sensory receptors in our body, which gives our brain feedback about our surroundings. You can feel your clothing on your skin. You can feel if the ceramic mug you are holding has hot or cold liquid in it, or you can feel the pain if you have a bruise on your shin because those sensory receptors in our body are relaying that information to our brain. Proprioception works the same way. We have these specialized sensory receptors in all of our tissues called proprioceptors, and they live in our muscles, in our tendons and in our joints, and they are specifically giving information to our brain about where we are in space and how we're moving. This is happening unconsciously all the time, usually, and our muscles are continuously telling our brain how our muscles are contracting, the angle that our joints in all of this stuff, more than we could even list out. We're constantly receiving feedback about where we are. Bringing this back to Pilates, how does Pilates help us get better at knowing where we are in space? Well, you've heard me share repeatedly on the podcast that the shapes and movements of our Pilates exercises are echoing each other within the Pilates repertoire. We often perform the same exercise on different pieces of equipment in similar ways, or we make the same shape, but in different ways. To illustrate that, I'm going to give you an example of the Pilates exercise swan. If we were to prepare for swan dive on the mat, we would lie on our stomach, hands under our shoulders, and straighten our arms, finding a back bend, also known as spinal extension, in our spine. Our legs would be completely supported by the floor and our arms would be pressing us up into that back bend shape. That same exercise swan exists on other pieces of Pilates equipment. We could also find swan on the reformer on the long box facing the footbar. Now we're lying on our stomach on the box and our lower legs are no longer supported to keep our legs in the same position that they were in on the mat. We have to hold our legs up in line with the rest of our leg, which requires some strength and some awareness of where our legs are in space. There is also a spring that is going to help us find that extension or deepen that extension because when we have our hands on the foot bar and we straighten our arms, when we find that back bend, the spring closing is pulling us into the shape that we're trying to make, which is that back bend or that spinal extension. For Swan on the chair, even less of our body is supported by the equipment. Our torso and most of our legs are free in space, and we need to know where we are in order to stay parallel to the floor in that plank shape at the start of our swan movement, similar to how we were on the reformer. The spring is also shortening and pulling us in the direction that we wanna go into that backend. So the spring is assisting us in finding that backend. On the ladder barrel, we have even less support and an even greater range of spinal movement accessible to us. We can go all the way from spinal flexion over the barrel into spinal extension off of the barrel, and the only part of us that's touching the barrel is our pelvis, and then we have our feet hooked under the ladder. We need more strength because there's no spring tension assisting us into that extension, just gravity is helping us into that flexion. So we need to be able to lift ourselves and know where our entire torso is in space with our hands not touching anything. We could then go back to the reformer and find swan on the reformer, but this time facing the pulleys instead of facing the footbar, lying on our stomach on the long box. Maybe in an exercise like pulling straps where we're pulling against the spring tension, having to overcome the spring tension to lift ourselves up, or even pulling wood where we have our hands on the rails of the reformer, and same idea of pulling with our arms, pulling ourselves into a back bend against the spring tension. So by changing our relation to the equipment, we can also change the challenge of the exercise and have those springs who were working with us before now working against us. What's important to note about all of those swan examples that I just shared is that we all have the same relation to gravity. Even though we're using different pieces of equipment, even though the equipment is giving us different feedback, even though the equipment is supporting more or less of our body, as we're doing the exercise, we were always moving into a back bend from a prone position. So where Pilates, I think, is kind of apart from other types of movement is that Pilates also challenges and strengthens our proprioception by asking us to make the same shape in a different relation to gravity. So not just in the prone position do we find a backend. We find a backend in other places as well. So for Swan, we can frequently find that same back bend shape upside down. We make that same shape of spinal extension when we do tree in the short box series, when we go into spinal extension over the short box. On the Cadillac, we can find that same back bend in spread Eagle prep and in spread eagle. On the reformer, thigh stretch is also a back bend that we find from a high kneeling position, when we're kneeling facing the pulleys. Although the feedback and the role of the springs in each exercise is different, the shape we're making is the same. The relation to gravity is different, but the shape is still the same. This is helping our brain build even more connections between the movements and where we are in space. If you've ever played soccer and you tried kicking the soccer ball with your non-dominant leg, or if you try to write with your non-dominant hand, you know that transferring movements from one place to another is not as simple as it sounds, but Pilates gives us the conditions to practice doing a familiar movement in an unfamiliar context. And the more practice we have in an unfamiliar context, the more familiar that context becomes. That leads to fewer surprises when we are in a genuinely new context. This is so important because our balance and our coordination tend to decline as we age, and not aging like in your sixties, seventies, eighties, like in your thirties, forties, and fifties we can start seeing a decline in balance and coordination, but we can fight that decline tooth and nail by continuing to challenge our bodies and build those connections in our brain through this intentional movement, through exercise. As a Pilates instructor and Pilates lover, I am a hundred percent biased towards Pilates, but I hope you also see a convincing argument here that it isn't just my love of Pilates that makes me say that Pilates has benefits for you. These context challenges of different equipment, different positioning in space, different tension makes Pilates ideal for developing your proprioception, which can help with your balance and coordination. Huge thank you to all my supporters on Buy Me a Coffee. Thank you for your support, particularly Kathryn who just joined as a monthly supporter. I'm really looking forward to some coffee chats this month. I hope you have a great couple weeks and I'll talk to you again soon.