Where am I?

I will admit to being slightly obsessed with proprioception.  However, in my defense, I’m seeing a lot of places lately where improved proprioception would have helped prevent injury or can help with rehabilitation.  If we don’t know where we are in space, how can we have a sense of whether we are properly aligned?  Or safe?

Think about, for example, that drunk test.  Arms out to the sides, eyes closed, can we touch our nose?  If not, we don’t know where we are in space.  We are not safe to drive.  That’s an extreme example, of course.  But consider a person with a knee problem.  Without a sense of where the knee is in space, that person can’t align the knee over the ankle, putting the knee at risk when stepping off curbs.

A lot of low back pain comes from poor posture.  Much of poor posture comes from lack of awareness—we just aren’t thinking about where we are and everything slumps.  Getting everything back in line and updating our sense of what is correct and normal can help.

Let’s tune in a little more.