“Awareness is all about restoring your freedom
to choose what you want
instead of what your past imposes on you.”
-Deepak Chopra
The pandemic has disrupted our lives with school closures, canceled sports, closed gyms and fitness centers with shelter in place orders that have altered the way we move and connect with our bodies. Many have sunken into sedentary lifestyles, with hours spent slumped on computers. Restrictions at gyms and parks, as well the reduction in organized sports, may have spared some ED visits for sprains and fractures, yet this lack of athletic participation also has deleterious effects to consider. Jumping back into sports or prior fitness regimes after sitting idle for many months is a recipe for injury.
We know from professional sports that injury rates go up exponentially after strikes and lock-downs. This is particularly problematic in team sports (soccer, football, lacrosse, hockey, rugby) and dual sports (tennis, taekwondo, judo, fencing). Training without tactical agility maneuvers of interactions with teammates and opponents decreases the autonomous learning and relearning of natural movement.
With the world opening up, sports medicine clinicians are bracing for a flood of injuries from recreational and competitive athletics. To minimize the risk of these injuries it’s important to ease cautiously back by training core proprioception, or body awareness, to help relearn our natural movement strategies for challenging our body safely. Retraining our proprioception will boost this important, unconscious “sixth sense’ to relearn how we navigate the world.
Our movements require accurate signals from our muscles, tendons, and joints firing to our brains. “If you don’t use it, you lose it” applies to our awareness of movement execution, as detraining of proprioception occurs when there is a cessation or substantial decrease of this sensory input. Just as the core hardware of our muscles must be trained and challenged, so must our software of our nervous system.
The lack of activity during the pandemic has not only had a significant effect on the body, but also the mind and the spirit, as witnessed by the skyrocketing rates of depression and anxiety, especially in kids. Many of our youth have also been robbed of opportunities to explore and play, problem solve, and grow, with less opportunity to develop mental and physical resilience, grit and character to ramp up resiliency of body-mind-spirit.
Although adversity of recent events has challenged us, I have seen many of my patients rise to this challenge with introspection seizing upon opportunity for self-improvement. I am witnessing a dramatic shift in mindset for countless patients who are expanding their locus of control over their own health and wellness. Instead of going to a gym or a yoga class, more people are taking a more pro-active role in researching ways to improve their own health of body-mind-spirit on their journey of growth. Cabin fever now has people flocking into the woods, mountains, rivers, lakes and oceans, returning us to our traditional outdoor roots.
The Olympic athletes have demonstrated resourcefulness and creativity when training for the upcoming games in Tokyo, despite the challenges of the pandemic. Closed pools forced divers to devise pads and trampolines in their backyards to simulate springboards, swimmers have flocked to open water, and combat sport athletes have been forced to enlist family members as sparring partners. Taking a break from the weight room has shifted the focus from barbells to Earth’s natural force of gravity with suspension training and plyometrics. Bodyweight, natural, functional exercises promote exploratory, intuitive motor learning which is not only fun, but effective in identifying weak links in our body’s chain that may not be easily noticed on a treadmill or squat rack. These types of movements enrich our mental maps of our bodies. These maps, or “engrams” are important for optimizing neuromuscular function and regulating our sensorimotor systems.
Mental training is equally important to developing proprioception as physical training. Practicing kinesthetic motor simulation using visualization and mental imagery trains proprioceptive power, and improves concentration, confidence and future performance. The pandemic has spurred broad social embrace of practicing mindfulness, or intentional presence in the moment which cultivates awareness of your breath, your core, your posture, how you sit, stand, and how you move.
Our wellness is more contingent on awareness of our thoughts, actions and reactions, rather than on external forces. “Weebles, the toys that “wobble but they don’t fall down” were popular when I was a kid. No matter how great the perturbation, they bounced right back up. Challenging our proprioception will teach your mind and body the Weeble mode of resiliency to overcome physical and emotional adversity to jump back into a healthy lifestyle and achieve your full potential!
