To hit a tennis ball or dance the merengue you need sharp eyes and a good ear. But there’s also another rarely discussed sense at work: proprioception, or body awareness. While it’s not one of the classic five senses, body awareness is crucial to moving and aging with grace. And it can be trained.
This sense is what tells you where your body is in space, and it’s always on, said Katherine Wilkinson, a neurobiologist at San Jose State University, who studies the basic science behind it.
When you reach for a cup of coffee, neurons and tissues embedded in your muscles, joints and tendons sense they’re being stretched, rotated or bent. This information travels to your brain, helping you coordinate your arm and hand. Elite gymnasts, dancers and football players tend to have particularly acute body awareness, but it also helps the rest of us recover after a slip.
Because these organs (known as proprioceptors) are in your muscles and tendons, your body awareness can be impaired or lost if you sprain your ankle or tear your rotator cuff. But it can be retrained by movement, which is part of why physical therapy is so important for a damaged joint or tendon, said Claire Morrow, a physical therapist with Hinge Health, a virtual clinic for muscle and joint pain.
Your body awareness naturally declines with age, increasing your risk of falls. This tends to make people more hesitant to move, said Jia Han, a professor of physiotherapy at Shanghai University of Medicine and Health Sciences. And so a vicious cycle begins: When you move less, your body awareness deteriorates, which prompts you to move even less. But there are several exercises that some small studies suggest can help improve your balance, stability and gait by enhancing awareness of your position and movement.
Doctors and physical therapists use specialized equipment to assess proprioception, but you can get a general sense of yours with two simple tests.
Test your upper body
Body awareness works alongside your eyes and inner ear to give you a mental picture of where your body parts are. But the eyes are an imperfect crutch — able to guide you into a static pose, say, but too slow to help you react to real-world movements. This test forces you to rely on your body awareness alone.
While standing in front of a mirror, close your eyes and try to raise both arms to shoulder height, parallel to the floor. Once you think you’re positioned like an uppercase ‘T,’ open your eyes and use the mirror to note how far your arms are from where you expected.
Although this exercise may seem easy, experts said many people are surprised at how far off they are. A small difference of a couple inches can often be addressed with targeted exercises said Katy Bowman, a biomechanist and author of “Rethink Your Position,” a body alignment and exercise guide.
A more extreme asymmetry (a difference of eight or more inches) could indicate a neurological condition like a stroke or Parkinson’s disease, said Dr. Han.
Test your lower body
This test assesses your lower body proprioception, especially in your ankles, knees and feet.
With your eyes open and both arms crossed over your chest, time how long you can keep your balance while standing on one leg. Repeat the exercise with your eyes closed. Repeat both tests with the other leg.
According to Dr. Morrow, healthy adults under 50 should be able to balance for 40 seconds with both eyes open and seven seconds with both eyes closed. By the time you reach your 70s, those numbers drop to 15 and two seconds. If your times deviate significantly from the average for your age range, consult a physical therapist or an exercise physiologist.
How to improve your body awareness
Once you’ve established your base-line body awareness, there are some strategies to maintain or even enhance it. You can expect to see noticeable gains after four to six weeks, Dr. Han said.
Add complexity to your moves
One way to improve body awareness is to make your established routines more varied.
Skip the weight machine and use free weights, which force you to coordinate your right and left sides. Use a mirror to check that your limbs are where you expect during exercise and teach your body how different positions feel.
“Your body has to practice feeling where it is in space to continue to know where it is,” said Ms. Bowman.
You can also try exercising on an unstable surface. Ms. Bowman recommended walking on grass or sand, which can challenge your feet and ankles into unfamiliar positions. Similarly, exercising with a wobble-board prompts you to engage new muscles and make adjustments that aren’t necessary on solid ground, said Eiman Azim, a neurobiologist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. If it’s safe to do so, you can up the ante by closing your eyes.
Challenge your strength and balance simultaneously
Because proprioception is mostly unconscious, practice moves that split your attention, like a multidirectional single-leg squat.
An inverted kettlebell press is another excellent exercise for wrist proprioception, Dr. Morrow said, because the wrist muscles must work harder to stabilize the joint while keeping a heavy weight aloft. For an added challenge, try having a conversation with a friend or watching a documentary during your workout.
Prioritize activities that demand agility
Proprioception is speedy — its signals reach the brain in a few milliseconds. Your vision, by contrast, can take 100 milliseconds. When your body awareness functions well, it helps you move with agility and intention.
To train it, we should “put ourselves in situations where we need to get to a specific point in space with precision and speed,” like hitting a fast moving pickleball or blocking a goal in soccer, Dr. Azim said.
You can try dancing, ball sports, martial arts or even parkour. But above all, move often, and move differently. When it comes to body awareness, you have to use it or you’ll lose it.
Connie Chang is a freelance science and parenting writer in Silicon Valley.
