proprioception
/ˌprə(ʊ)prɪəˈsɛpʃn/ noun PHYSIOLOGY: perception or awareness of the position and movement of the body.
Proprioception is not something you think about in your daily life - but your daily life is shaped by it. Constantly. What is it?
Proprioception is your body’s ability to feel its place and movement in space and the relationship to its surroundings.
For example, feeling the ground under your feet, and the nature of the surface, is simple proprioception. Sensing where to place your feet when walking up some stairs or how to sit down correctly on a chair is proprioception. Feeling your balance and motion as you undertake a self defence technique or a strike, such as a kick or a punch, are other examples of the same.
Proprioception is required for fluid and precise movements, making this natural skill especially important for self defence practitioners.
Serious self defence students and instructors should pay important attention to training proprioception. It can be included in nearly all Krav Maga training sessions - and will bring immense value if so done.
Proprioception is best perceived when other sensory inputs are excluded, leaving the brain to solely focus on the proprioception itself. For example, by removing visual input and audial disturbances your proprioception training will be aided tremendously.
This gives you a clue to how to simply apply proprioception in a training session.
Simply execute the technique movement or sequence with eyes closed and without audio commands being given throughout. When doing this, you solely rely on your sense of movement, balance and touch to determine your position to the opponent, how you both are moving and where to strike.
Not real life, you say - as your eyes are always available to you? Now try and train in a very dark room or outside at night, or if your vision is disturbed by something thrown onto your face or by an impact to your head. Rethink and realise that proprioception may be much more important to train than you may first realise.
Proprioception exercises can be applied towards the middle or end of training a technique or striking sequence.
After learning the technique, building it up step by step in a session, a great follow up is to embed the movements more firmly into the mind memory is to execute them with the eyes closed.
The immediate benefit the student will experience is the much greater sense of focus the removal of other sensory input will create. This added focus aids not only the execution of the technique, but it solidifies it more strongly in brain’s neural pathways and builds myelin around your axons (nerve fibres) helping your muscles to act better to your neural commands in the future.
Try it out. You’ll be surprised about the effects.
Another great way of using it is in a slow and controlled fashion where an attacker (with eyes open) repeatedly delivers grabs, holds and other close range attacks, whilst the defender - with eyes continuously closed - defends, using learned techniques. It also brings in an element of stress training, simultaneously. Important note: the exercise MUST be executed slowly and with fluidity for safety reasons. No speedy punches or flying elbows, blindly thrown around.
When will I ever need to defend myself with my eyes closed, you may ask? Never, hopefully - unless as we stated above you’ve got something thrown in them, sand, for example - or whenever your eyes are de facto closed, such as an attack on you in an unlit, dark space or against sharp and blinding sunlight.
Proprioception may be all you have in these circumstances. Train it well.