Proprioception Update

This has been sitting in my editing box for more than a month now.  Since it’s Dyscalculia Awareness Month, I figured it’s only appropriate that I dust it off and publish it.

Awhile back I wrote about a painful muscle strain I’d developed in my shoulder and neck area.  Like many dyscalculics, I have a poor sense of my body in space, and how not to move without hurting myself.  Most of the time I hurt myself in small ways, by running into things.  Other times I develop repetitive stress injuries because I’m not aware that I’m holding myself in an awkward, damaging position.

It started when I was sick, curled up on the couch in a position that didn’t feel awkward at the time.  I was sort of aware of pain and discomfort, but I kept working out, and then I did some work on my car, and then I woke up the next morning unable to sit up.  It seriously took me several minutes to figure out how to get out of bed without screaming.

Since then I’ve had some deep tissue massage, some stretching, some ultrasound massage, more stretching, a lot of advil, more stretching, sports gel, more stretching, hot and cold packs, and more stretching.  The injury seemed to stay about the same.  It would hurt like hell when I woke up, then I would massage the area with sports gel, and it would be much better.  Then I’d wake up the next morning once again in horrible pain.

What finally helped was a trick from the Alexander Technique that I’d learned several years ago — the “semi-supine” position.  The idea is to relax your muscles by lying on your back in a completely neutral position; that is, your feet are flat on the floor, your knees are bent, your head is supported, and your spine is allowed to fall into its natural shape.  By doing this for ten minutes I already felt better than I had in weeks.  This 46 second video demonstrates how to do it.

Alexander Tehcnique, Semi-Supine Position

Since My New Year’s resolution was to improve my proprioception with the precise goal of not doing this crap to myself anymore, I had already checked out some books from the library about the Alexander Technique.  One of them introduced me to the “prone position”, in which you lie on your stomach, your chest supported by a few books or a yoga brick, and your forehead on the floor.  In this position, your spine bears no weight at all; and according to the book, it was a good remedy for tightness in in the shoulder and neck area.  After doing that for ten minutes, following ten minutes in semi-supine, I felt almost normal.

So, at last, my shoulder and neck are feeling a lot better.

There are a lot of Alexander resources out there.  This video is pretty informative, though I get a bit of a “dear leader” vibe from it.  The book I found to be the most useful was called How You Stand, How You Move, How You Live. It’s free of a lot of the pseudoscience that plagues these sorts of books.  In fact, it goes a step farther, with the author explaining in basic evolutionary terms why humans have trouble with movement and injury while other animals don’t.  Basically, the issue is one of neuroplasticity.  Whereas other animals are born knowing how to walk, humans have freed up that brain space to enable us to learn.  The upside is that we’re really adaptable.  The downside need to be taught almost everything that we know and do, including movement.