Poor proprioception, which is a term in medicine for body awareness plus balance, is a leading cause of numerous common conditions affecting patients in our Neuroworks Chiropractic clinic every day.
What Is Proprioception?
It’s the concept of knowing exactly where your own body is in space, which is body awareness, and the capability of safely manoeuvring around your environment. It helps you to achieve, beautiful posture, quality movement as well as solid balance.
There are some parts of your body that are high in proprioceptive tissue; they include your pelvis, jaw, upper neck and feet. These areas relay messages to your brain to let your body know where precisely it is in space. Thus, if anything is wrong with one of these areas (for instance, an injury to one of your feet) that can end up changing the message that is being sent to your brain. Consequently, that can affect your balance, movement patterns as well as posture. This, in turn, can lead to pain plus injury.Here are some of the conditions that can be associated with poor proprioception:
- Headaches
- Functional Scoliosis
- Tennis Elbow
- Back pain
- Poor posture
- Neck pain
- Vertigo
- R.S.I (Repetitive strain injury)
- Ankle sprains
- Falls (leading to injury as well as broken bones)
Treatment Options
Chiropractic offers treatments to help you improve proprioception, which helps many conditions that people face. Chiropractic adjustments are a powerful tool used in improving proprioception. Also, in our clinic, we are passionate regarding rehabilitation. We have numerous great methods for improving muscle strength as well as function and retraining your muscle patterns. Moreover, there are amazing exercises to stimulate your proprioceptive tissues in various areas of your body to help improve your balance.
Balance Retraining Exercises
When you’re suffering from a disorder of the inner ear, certain movements or positions can make you feel dizzy and lose balance. Vestibular rehabilitation exercises, like repeating positions and movements that cause dizziness, help your brain to get accustomed to the loss of balance reaction. That helps your brain adapt accordingly, hence the dizziness is eliminated or reduced.
Balance retraining exercises help in resolving the conflict that is between the brain and the system of the internal ear to restore the ability to balance. Since your eye muscles and ear nerve are connected, you will also have to engage in exercises for visual coordination to retrain balance. While these rehabilitation exercises are taking effect, physical exercises like yoga and tai chi are going to help you build coordination and balance further.
Building Strong Bones and Muscles
Generally, strength training exercises are vital to your health as well as your well-being. When performed consistently, these exercises will keep your bones and muscles strong and support balance. You should do strength training exercises 2-3 times on a weekly basis to maintain or build strength and also to develop a full ROM (range of motion).
You can also add a few exercises that strengthen balance to your workout, like knee marching, single-leg stances without and with your arms raised or you can step to the side while in a straight line then go back to the initial position.
If you need an experienced Chiswick Chiropractor, contact the team at Neuroworks Chiropractic. You will receive individual assessments as well as tailor-made treatment plans from our experienced and well-qualified chiropractors who will integrate treatment that is unique to your needs.