Your Sixth Sense, at Your Feet

Proprioception, sometimes called your “sixth sense”, is en vogue. I hear more and more people mentioning it in the world of biomechanics, exercise, and tango. But do we really understand what it is, how it works, and what it means for our movement, exercise routine and lifestyle choices? In this blog post, I’ll try to demystify proprioception, but I also would love to establish its primordial dependence on the foundation of our upright being - our amazing feet.

1. What is Proprioception?

Proprioception is generally described as your body's ability to sense its own position and movements in space. It helps you balance, plan your movements, and avoid injury. It is permanently at work, adapting your movement to current constraints and tasks in hand. However, most of the time, we have no idea what this sense is doing for us and how it works, not to mention that we are still far from scientifically understanding it all.

Technically, proprioception has a few components:

Sense of where your joints and body parts are in space
Awareness of your body motion (kinaesthesia) - how you use the above with duration, direction, amplitude, speed, acceleration and timing of movements
Sense of force (effort / heaviness / tension), ability to match a desired level of force.

Neurologically, it depends on sensory receptors located in your skin, joints, and muscles, with their inputs summarised in a complex, multifaceted way. It is basically a continuous dance (feed-forward and feed-back, showing and responding) between sensory receptors throughout your body and your nervous system, working together towards the best movement choices.

2. How is proprioception achieved?

The most important receptors allowing us to achieve all of that are spread through muscles. But guess what: to record these messages, muscles have to be active, sensitive to small and rapid length changes within them. If a particular muscle cannot be activated and change in length, you are missing out on its proprioceptive response. If a muscle is overly engaged and “tight”, you have less ability to sense what happens in that area.

How do you know your proprioception is not optimal? The most obvious way is to notice whether you must use your vision as a compensation. For example, if you have to look at your feet while walking and dancing, you use your eyes instead of sensing the position and movement of your feet. Few people on the planet who don’t have a working sense of proprioception can only get up to standing while carefully watching all of their parts to coordinate them - a task that is nearly impossible, or so exhausting that you wouldn’t want to do it at all!

3. Proprioception and learning as an adult

Proprioception is crucial for learning new ways of moving, like in sports and dancing, and, obviously, our modern online world is full of advice on proprioceptive training. Most often, it will cover balance exercises of varying degrees of difficulty, maybe with your eyes closed.

But I want to direct your gaze somewhere else: I invite you to look (with your mind’s eye) at your feet and the possibilities that you might be hiding in your (often high-heeled) shoes! So let’s work it out from the ground up.

Five tips for improving proprioception by using your feet

First, the sensitivity of your feet’s sole skin has a huge say in your overall postural control. Any smallest pressure changes under your feet are communicated “upwards” in order to change your posture and body position to make sure you are safe. With age, this sensitivity diminishes and becomes one of the factors behind more frequent falls. Or is it because, while getting older, we spend more and more years in shoes instead of being barefoot?

Here is my no. 1 tip for effortlessly improving your proprioception (and better sense weight shifts in tango!):

1. Spend more time barefoot (when safe and out of the dancefloor!), preferably on different textures and uneven surfaces.

This can also be incredibly soothing for your tired feet after a night of dancing - I find a particular pleasure in digging my bare toes and heels into the black soil of my garden patch the next day.

Second, each of your feet is a complex world of its own, containing 26 muscles, 33 joints and over 100 ligaments and tendons. Only the sole side of your foot has four layers of muscles. This is a proprioceptive Klondike, with one important distinction: you can’t exhaust it, and the benefits of exploring it go far beyond your foot.

“The tiny stretches in between every one of each foot’s twenty-six bones are a gold mine of proprioception that allow the pelvis to make three-dimensional positional adjustments based on these tiny movements.” (Katy Bowman)

Actually, your foot has its own proprioceptive subsystem that:

Offers local dynamic support
Senses foot position
Provides postural control
Actively controls balance in a standing position
Controls foot position on uneven terrain
Facilitates higher recruitment of the muscles when additional load is applied (sorry, that was a nerdy way to say that when suddenly your partner is falling on you, it’s your feet that communicate to other body parts and their muscles that they need to come on board, too, to prevent falling!)

Your intrinsic (internal, small but mighty!) foot muscles provide immediate sensory information when changes in foot alignment occur. The problem? Most of us, even dancers, even some professional dancers, are not using the deep foot muscles, limiting their ability to do their mighty job. (Remember the fact that the most important proprioceptors are located in the muscles?) How come?

Mostly, it’s about the shoes we wear and the surfaces we walk on: conventional shoes and flat surfaces don’t require you to engage those muscles in your daily walking life. Even worse, wearing heels leaves you with more restrictions on space for your toes, even fewer possibilities to use your intrinsic muscles, and disrupted joint mechanics.

Do I preach the banning of a high-heeled shoe altogether? No way. I love wearing beautiful heels for dancing: even when I decided to get rid of all my heels years ago (0.5 cm does count as a heel, too, sorry folks), I couldn’t part with my tango heels.

But what I do preach is to approach this as your diet: if 80% of what you eat nourishes you well, you can most of the time get away with the 20% of sweets and junk. If 80% of your time you give your feet possibilities to move well, in a nourishing way, developing your intrinsic muscles and proprioceptive abilities, you can get away with 20% of not optimal shoe time.

My tip no. 2 for building up your proprioception will therefore be:

2. Give your feet nourishing movement possibilities when you don’t have to wear limiting shoewear.

And this could be another reason to do barefoot walking on uneven surfaces, or switch to minimal shoewear. Getting yourself a pair or two of toe socks will help your proprioception and intrinsic muscles, too - without adding much to your to-do list. Toe spacers that you put on when you go to sleep could be another easy option.

A word of caution about shoes, however: they often require a transition period. While some people will put on their barefoot shoes for the first time and feel like they are walking in heaven, for many, a sudden switch can be tricky and even result in pain and injury. The reason is the same as why you wouldn’t decide overnight to run a marathon if everything you did so far was spending time at your desk. There are plenty of beautiful advantages, but you must take time and build up your tissue capacity slowly, especially with that amount of ligaments.

And building up the tissue capacity brings me to tip no. 3, which will help to expand your proprioception further, especially for dancers:

3. Load the small but mighty feet muscles even more through specific daily feet “routines” or explorations.

The intrinsic foot muscles respond well to training, and setting them to work will be beneficial for your whole self (that, not so surprisingly, includes your pelvic floor).

For tango-dancers out there - I recently took a couple of online classes with Virginia Vasconi “Biomechanics on the block”, and I can totally recommend them to start with. Your feet have possibilities and powers you are not aware of - but that’s more than another blog post.

My next tip will, probably, be the most obvious and fun:

4. Use your hands to massage your feet, palpate your foot bones and mobilise your joints.

Touch is a great tool to remind your nervous system of all the territory that is available. Sometimes we need someone else’s touch to clarify what is and bring a new sense of possibilities. Individual Feldenkrais sessions (Functional Integration) are another way of moving beyond the movement and attention biases each of us has.

And I will link this to my final tip:

5. Take a (non-dancing) class that requires you to use your feet differently.

Yoga, Tai-Chi, and Awareness Through Movement are just a few ideas.

Focussing on body awareness, subtle movements and the associated sensory feedback without much reliance on your vision is a crucial part of every Feldenkrais lesson (ATM). We, practitioners, have plenty of feet-centred lessons in our vocabulary, and they are always fun. We are dying to get asked to teach one of those, so you know what to do :)

Now, the elephant in the room. Will playing with your feet proprioception cover all your proprioceptive needs? Not exactly, you still have to move and listen to the rest of yourself. But let me just say that when the proprioceptive signals from a person’s ankles are purposely disrupted in a science lab, and this person is asked to close their eyes, there is no sense of balance left: they fall immediately.

What matters at the end is that your best scientific lab is always with you. Because it IS YOU. If you are curious enough, you get plenty of opportunities during your day to play with movement, balance and proprioception wherever you are and whatever you’re up to :)

P.S.: For tango dancers who made it so far: have you heard of tango-proprioception? This is when you become one with your partner from the sensory point of view, and move with this information in mind. You can start by noticing the sense of your partner’s feet on the floor while moving in an embrace - it can be a lot of fun!

Helpful resources to explore this topic further:

Book by Katy Bowman, Whole Body Barefoot: Transitioning Well to Minimal Footwear
Article by Katy Bowman, If The Shoe Fits, as well as any of her Move Your DNA podcasts on feet
Documentary by Vincent Amouroux: Proprioception: The Real 6th Sense
Short anatomy video by 3D Anatomy Lyon: Foot muscular organisation and function
Article by Tango Topics: Tango Proprioception