morning mastery

Beaufort health and fitness: Proprioception

“Hey! What’s going on? It’s Ian Hart here and today I wanted to talk to you about Proprioception and how it relates to back pain and other pain that you might be having. So if you’ve seen some of my videos on mobility, as well as just active movement and the back programs specifically then you know that proprioception is a major factor in those things.

And proprioception – the definition here (this is taken from Google) is the sense of the relative position of the neighboring parts of the body and strength of the effort employed in movement. So essentially we have nerves throughout the body. It sends information, our sensory system sends information to our brain. It’s also the inner ear which sends information to the brain and then we have special awareness of ourselves, it’s what allows us to touch our finger to our nose. If we’re lacking in proprioception, we would miss. And this is why, you know, athletes who play on different levels have high proprioceptors when it comes to… I don’t know, swinging a baseball or hitting a tennis ball, where as someone else would go up and completely whiff and miss a baseball if they swing at it. So those are the things that are getting fine tuned for an athlete. But, for somebody with back pain this is extremely important, because we lose proprioception in certain areas when they don’t move. So, sitting down all day causes us to decrease proprioception, our brain connections to the nerves on the lower back, and when there’s lack of proprioception, the body has an amazing ability to let you know about it, and it will start to create a pain sensation or can start to create a pain sensation.

So just increasing proprioception, which is what the back program does; it’s part of the numerous factors of what it does is increases proprioception. So therefore, back pain, just from increasing proprioception, dissipates or people find relief. It’s the same with the shoulder. You know if you have like a shoulder issue and you haven’t been moving your body, if you do mobility stuff, you know, a few times a day for a few days you’ll notice that your shoulder might feel a hundred times better depending on the issue, that’s kind of a generalization. But really, sending information from our body to our brains will help with mobilization, it will help synovial fluid get activated, it will help with overall proprioception.

Now, there’s a threat level, there’s a hierarchy of threat that our body has and if we are deprived of oxygen, our threat level goes up right? we become more stressed. If our vision is impaired, our stress levels go up and our movement goes down. The third one of the hierarchy is proprioception so if your proprioception goes down, your threat level goes up.

So a few things: breathing will release stress and doing it in a specific way, deep breaths, belly breaths letting your belly rise possibly holding it for few seconds, you’ll notice there’s a bunch of different techniques right? I like to breathe in through the nose, breathe in for 4 seconds, hold it for 4 seconds and then breathe out for 8 seconds to let my body relax, that’s one of the ways I do it. Vision, I do exercises for the eyes, I move my eyes back and forth; if you’ve seen our morning mastery video we go through a bunch of these things. And then, proprioception, which is the back program, it’s also our full body mobility videos, etcetera.

So when you incorporate just those three aspects to, say, like a morning routine you’re going to notice your stress level go down, your pain levels go down, you’ll automatically feel better because you’re activating the body and the neurochemicals release the feel good chemicals. So, we’re talking about just one thing – Proprioception. I went off on a little bit of a tangent speaking about other threats to the body, but here’s the number one part that increases threat, which is proprioception. I hope this helps. This is Ian Hart with My Back Pain Coach and Back Pain Relief4Life. I’ll see you on the other side.”

Ian Hart is a Body-Mind Transformation expert, the creator of EarthFIT Training Systems, co-creator of BACK PAIN RELIEF4LIFE, and founder of BEAUFORTPERSONALTRAINING.COM and MYBACKPAINCOACH.COM. Ian and his team help people get into optimal shape in the safest, fastest and most effective way possible, using cutting edge science.