Proprioception is your body's ability to sense its movements and location in space, so you can move freely and safely without having to think about it.
Proprioception is sometimes called "body awareness." It’s like a 6th sense of sorts—in addition to seeing, feeling, hearing, tasting, and smelling. It allows your body to perceive where it is and how it’s moving in your space, relative to other objects. This sense allows you to do things like touch your finger to your nose with your eyes closed or walk on an uneven surface without falling. It also allows you to maintain stable posture.
Also called kinesthesia, proprioception is responsible for your motor coordination, balance, and even stable posture—whether you’re standing, sitting, walking, getting dressed, doing chores, working out, or moving in any other way. Without this skill, you would be unable to move well or interact with your environment in a safe or functional way.
You’ve got to work on your proprioception to keep it functioning well
Your proprioceptive skills can wane due to aging, surgery, injury, or disease. In turn, this can worsen your balance and motor control, increasing your risk of falls. But you can take steps to help maintain and even improve your proprioceptive skills—no matter your age.
Proprioceptive training is one way to do this. Training your proprioception can improve your balance, gait, control of body movements, and functional mobility. This can lower your risk of falls, helping ensure that you live a healthy and independent life for years to come.
Let’s take a closer look at how proprioception works, and then move onto some training and exercise videos that can help you keep it sharp.
The proprioceptive system
Your body has sensory receptors in your joints, muscles, tendons, and skin that send signals to your brain, telling it where your body is in space and how it’s moving. It also tells your brain the speed and force of your movements.
Your brain interprets these signals and then sends other signals back to your muscles via the motor nerves of your body and limbs. This constant feedback loop helps you sense and subconsciously adjust your body’s movements, along with the speed and force of them. It also tells you where objects are in relation to your body.
This feedback loop helps keep your body from bumping into walls, furniture, or other objects. It allows you to extend your arm and hand to exactly where your cup of coffee sits on the table. It allows you to lift a forkful of food to your mouth and not miss. It tells you whether your feet are in contact with pavement, sand, or grass when you’re walking. And it helps you right yourself if you get off balance.
How your vision and the vestibular system also play a role
The vestibular system consists of structures within the inner ear, including tiny, hair-like sensory receptors. These inner ear receptors sense the movement and position of your head in relation to your body. They then send signals to the brain with this information.
These vestibular system signals tell your brain whether your body is balanced. They also tell your brain whether you need to change the speed or direction of your movements. In this way, the vestibular system plays a part in helping you keep your balance. And it does this by triggering your reflexes so you can adjust your movements to stay on your feet.
These are called your righting reflexes, and they’re what give you the ability to react and move quickly when something throws you off balance. Let’s say you trip and start to fall. Your righting reflexes help you catch and regain your balance. Your vestibular system is, in part, responsible for this ability.
The vestibular system works in sync with both your vision and your proprioceptive system to further hone your sense of balance, movement, and the orientation of your body.
Your vision allows you to see objects in your environment that you either need to reach for, pick up, manipulate, or avoid. These instantaneous signals to your brain about what you’re seeing around you help inform your proprioception. It allows your brain to plan your body’s movements.
Your vision also plays a role in helping you maintain your balance and posture, whether you’re standing still or moving. If you’ve ever gotten out of bed in the pitch dark, you’ve likely experienced a sense of disorientation and a lack of balance.
What can cause problems with proprioception?
As you age, or if you are sedentary and inactive, the signals that travel through your proprioceptive feedback loop tend to slow down. This, coupled with changes in the brain and the rest of your nervous system, as well as alterations of muscle structure and function, can impair your proprioception. This loss of muscle strength can also impair your proprioception.
Many health conditions can also affect proprioception, including:
The good news is that doing proprioceptive training exercises, like the ones in this article, can help slow declines caused by age and certain health conditions. And this kind of training can also help you regain some of the proprioceptive abilities you’ve lost.
Signs to watch out for
Some signs that your proprioception has weakened can include trouble:
If you notice one or more of these signs, reach out to your doctor. They can do several tests to evaluate your proprioception and/or refer you to a physical therapist (PT). A PT can also give you specific exercises to help regain some of your lost abilities.
Proprioception training to help keep this 6th sense strong
Several studies with older adults (of various stages of health) have demonstrated big improvements in functional mobility, balance, gait, and risk of falls after engaging in proprioception training exercises.
Your doctor may recommend you work with a PT before beginning a proprioception training routine. Or, if your doctor gives you the OK, you can do proprioceptive strengthening exercises on your own.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the different options you might want to try—or which ones your PT may recommend.
Think about a time when you stood on one foot. Did you notice all the tiny, rapid movements your ankle, foot, and lower leg muscles constantly made to help keep you on that one foot? Did you also notice that you weren’t consciously making these tiny, adjustment-like movements? This is your proprioceptive system in action, and it’s what makes balance training such an effective way to keep this skill strong.
You can do these kinds of exercises to improve your balance with or without a physical therapist. As your balance improves, you can make certain exercises more challenging by doing them with your eyes closed. Just make sure you have a stable chair, wall, or countertop to help keep you on your feet if you try them with your eyes closed.
These challenges are known as perturbations. They are meant to be random and unexpected. A physical therapist, for example, may gently push you as you stand on one foot. Or you might try to keep your balance on an unstable surface, such as a balance board.
PBT mimics those unexpected, real-life events that throw you off balance and which you are unable to foresee. Like when you’ve slipped on a patch of ice. Or someone bumps into you in a crowd. You might have caught your foot on uneven pavement. The goal is to develop your reactive balance for such events. And strengthening your proprioception with PBT exercises can help you do that.
But if your ankles are injury-free and stable enough, and you don’t have problems with your balance, think about taking your walking routine to the beach, a grassy park, or even to some hiking trails. Walking on uneven ground works your ankles and lower legs a little harder than walking on a smooth surface does. This can help keep your proprioception strong.
5 exercise videos to help boost your proprioception
The links below will take you to a series of 5 videos with individual exercises to help improve your proprioception.
These exercises are best done with bare feet. You can do all exercises in one session, 3 to 4 times per week, or even daily. Do each activity 3x for 30 seconds each.
It’s important not to take your proprioception for granted. You can see the critical role it plays in balance, mobility, lowering risk of falls, and the day-to-day body movements you need in your daily life. If you’ve noticed a drop in your proprioceptive abilities, talk with your doctor right away about what you can do to regain them.
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This information is not intended to take the place of regular medical care or advice. Please check with your doctor before using this information or beginning any self-care program. Images used for this article do not depict any members of the Silver&Fit Program.
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This article was written by Gail Olson, edited by Kim Reynolds, and clinically reviewed by Jaynie Bjornaraa, PhD, MPH, PT, SCS, ATC, CSCS, on December 21, 2023.