Train your body's sense of movement, force, and position to improve balance and reduce injury risk.
So much of your well-being depends on understanding your unique body and its movements. People often focus their routines on making physical improvements — increased flexibility via yoga, improved strength by working with an Equinox Coach — and sometimes overlook the other subtle elements that directly influence their chances of living long, healthy lives.
One such element: Proprioception. It’s your ability to know where you are in space and to move and correct your body as needed. It plays a crucial role in Pilates — the program’s emphasis on mind-body connection depends on it — and also in life. Your sense of balance keeps you upright, safe, and alive. Proprioception affects every muscle and every movement. And yet, it’s rare for someone to talk specifically about it, let alone set goals around improving it.
Maybe you should.
The Importance of Proprioception
If you think of proprioception as your felt sense of the body in space, it quickly becomes clear how much your life depends on it.
Proprioception helps you know where the stairs you're about to step on are located, where to grab a weight while strength training, and — maybe more importantly — where to put it down so it doesn’t smash your foot. You use it all the time in your daily life.
Consider this: In 2020, falls caused more than 36,000 deaths among adults 65 and older, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And it’s not only older adults who suffer the consequences of losing balance: In the U.S., falls are the leading cause of unintentional injury across age groups. If you’ve suffered an injury from a fall and managed to avoid an E.R. visit, you still likely reaped the consequences, whether that meant dealing with crutches on a subway commute or unexpected downtime from training. With better proprioception, these types of injuries may be avoided.
In terms of fitness, proprioception is vital for performance and results. It helps you sense when you’re in alignment as you perform kettlebell swings in your group fitness classes and counterbalance the weights you’re lifting during strength sessions. By heightening your awareness of posture, proprioception helps reduce the odds you’re moving with poor form or training the wrong muscles. In turn, you might have a lower risk of injury and be more likely to attain the aesthetic results you’re after.
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How to Assess Your Proprioception
You’ve likely witnessed the difference between people who have an innate sense of balance and those who don’t. But what many people don’t realize is that proprioception is a skill; there are ways of training and heightening that awareness.
Like most elements of fitness and wellness, the best way to gauge your current level of proprioception is to work with an expert. A Pilates instructor or Equinox Coach will be able to see the way you sense your body in space more easily than you can (initially) feel it.
But if you’re interested in self-assessing, testing your balance is a simple way to also evaluate your proprioception. Stand up straight and lift your right foot off the floor. Can you stay relatively still, or do you wobble? When you try this exercise, you’ll notice your left foot moves in tiny motions, making adjustments to keep you upright. That’s proprioception at work.
How to Enhance Proprioception
1. Ditch your shoes.
One of the simplest ways to improve your proprioception doesn’t require changing your fitness routine. All you need to do is ditch your shoes. People often spend the majority of their days in shoes without realizing that they’re affecting their sense of balance, gait, and foot function. Moreover, new research shows promising evidence that walking barefoot can increase balance recovery (i.e., how your body responds to prevent a fall after losing balance) in older adults.
Go barefoot more often to reconnect with how you feel in space and how you relate to the ground beneath you. Attending classes at Equinox where you take off your shoes — yoga, Pilates, or barre, for instance — will increase your awareness of your body and the world around you. At home, go barefoot as much as you can. It sounds crazy, but try using your feet to do things you wouldn’t normally do, like picking up a pen you drop with your toes or using your foot to lift a pair of pants from the floor.
2. Try Pilates — especially on the reformer.
As Equinox’s Director of Pilates Education, I’m undeniably biased, but everything about the Pilates methodology, including its principles of centering, control, and precision, encourages balance. In a mat class or private reformer session, you’ll pay attention to and strengthen your entire core — not just your abdominals, but the whole center of your body. You’ll also strengthen your hips so you can hold yourself upright better — vital for balance. Over time, you’ll find yourself more aware of how your limbs move through space in class and throughout the rest of your day.
This is especially true if you’re using the reformer, which provides an incredible feedback loop for the body as you’re beginning to train your sense of the body in space. The design of the reformer means that your feet and shoulders are held in place. Your arms have to pull straps requiring a sense of balance and precision. Even the nature of footwork exercises emphasizes precision. (Interestingly, many people’s feet cramp when they first engage in Pilates footwork — a sign of just how little attention people give to the nuanced movements of their feet, even though they stand on them their whole lives.)
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3. Check in with your proprioception over time.
Adding Pilates to your weekly routine will carry into other classes and training sessions. When you squat with heavier weights, you'll find yourself thinking, “Am I crooked?” Over time, you’ll have a better sense of how your knees are bent and where they’re positioned. All of that will help your form, your balance, and the integrity of your movements. Remember, proprioception is a skill that needs to be consistently trained, so don’t put it on the back burner.
In the end, anything you do to increase your proprioception — whether it’s taking a regular Pilates Rise class or spending the weekend barefoot — will benefit you. The sooner you start, the better.
Carrie Samper is the Director of Pilates Education at Equinox. She has been with Equinox for 19 years and developed all of the Equinox Pilates Training Institute curriculum. Originally certified in Pilates by Romana Kryzanowska in 2001, she received a second certification from Power Pilates in 2005 and has been NCPT (National Certified Pilates Teacher) credentialed since 2007.