Top athletes’ secret skill is a little thing called proprioception

Why are some people gifted with excellent body awareness, while others can’t stand on one leg without falling over if their eyes are closed?

The disparity is due to a faculty called proprioception, the body’s ability to appreciate its position in space. This sense is highly tuned in some people, giving them quicker reflexes and rendering their movements so fluid they appear preternatural.

According to Jon Patricios, professor of  sport and exercise medicine at Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand, there are two criteria for good proprioception. “Genetics, if you are wired with good proprioception, and practise. People who have better proprioception are wired differently and practise their skill more,” he says.

Patricios says there are four key domains in body function that determine proprioception. The ocular system, where we take information through the eyes and interpret it; the vestibular system which helps you appreciate where you are and make adjustments; the neurological system, also known as the nervous system; and the musculoskeletal system which includes muscles, bones, cartilage, ligaments, tendons and connective tissues.

“The information from these systems travels along integrated neurological pathways to your brain. These pathways are like a spaghetti junction or a highway with different loops and areas. It is extremely complex, a lot of fine-tuning happens as information is processed and then fed out so the resultant movement or response is fluid.

“The time when our proprioception is optimal is when we’re in our 20s and 30s. This is when physiologically we are at our best. After that it starts to decline. That’s one of the reasons athletes often leave their sport when they’re in their 30s. Our bodies degenerate as we age ... a 70-year-old will tend to be less proprioceptively astute than a 20-year-old. I wouldn’t say children have better proprioception because someone in their 20s who has practised a skill will be better than a seven-year-old,” says Patricios.

“The top athletes have exceptional proprioception. Take cricketer AB de Villiers and his ability to see a ball coming at him and change his position in milliseconds. A lot of it is inherent ability and this would apply to most top sportspeople.

“A  prima ballerina is  able to achieve amazing positions. Then there are creative all-rounders like Herschelle Gibbs. I first saw him playing schoolboy rugby; he is a phenomenal player. Besides speed, he has several other attributes, such as his position on the field and appreciation of others on the field. . But you need more than inherent ability to be successful, such as practise and mental fortitude. Some of the best have not necessarily moved on to be successful.”

Aviwe November is a dancer and choreographer for Mzansi Ballet. For him, learning a dance move begins with understanding gravity. The feel of an aerial movement is first experienced on the floor to allow the brain and body to assimilate the sensation.

“A dancer needs to understand their weight and where their centre of gravity goes as they move. To do double turns in the air, first a dancer must roll on the floor, feel how fast their body must turn, so the brain switches on to how, when and where the body must move. It takes a lot of training because it’s about balance and weight, otherwise you injure yourself. Dancing skills take 10,000 hours to master to be able to get onto the stage and do it so it feels like instinct,” he says.

UNDERSTANDING THE LANGUAGE OF THE BODY

For world champion boxer Isaac Chilemba sharpened proprioceptive abilities ensure he is one step ahead of his opponent.

“I try to think ahead, read their body language before they make a step. In boxing, the name of the game is hit and don’t get hit. I always know exactly where I am in that boxing ring, that four-by-four quad. I know when I am close to the rope and I know the distance to my opponent. A boxer’s positioning is everything, you always know your surroundings. A punch travels quite fast, at 30km an hour, so you need to be quick to react.

"When I look at talent, the most important thing for me is how quick a boxer is on his feet and his selection of punches. These movements determine how good a fighter can be,” says Chilemba.

The night before a fight I lie in bed and visualise my fight. I have a picture of my opponent in my head. I see myself winning so when I step inside the ring I know I’ve already won

Boxing relies on external perception — what the opponent is about to do — as well as the body’s deeper sensibilities around posture, balance, how a muscle needs to lengthen and the amount of force it needs to exert to throw a punch. During a boxing match balance is dynamic, with the proprioceptive systems working to micro-adjust muscle movements, particularly in the trunk and legs, to counteract the unsteadiness. Being a champion fighter takes more than exceptional aptitude and peak fitness.

For Chilemba, famous fighters always have something: “Mohammed Ali was quick on his feet, Mike Tyson had his uppercuts and hooks. I try to improve my movements by practising them over and over until I pick them up. The night before a fight I lie in bed and visualise my fight. I have a picture of my opponent in my head. I see myself winning so when I step inside the ring I know I’ve already won,” he says.

VISUALISATION CAN ENHANCE PROPRIOCEPTION

Visualising something in the mind’s eye is more sensory than experiencing it solely through the eyes and this makes it a powerful technique in preparing the body for a specific event. South African Olympic women’s artistic gymnastics coach Ilse Roets Pelser believes visualisation is key to performance and if done correctly can be a game-changer.

“We have mental trainers working with the girls and teaching them how to visualise. We try to give the mental side of our sport the attention it deserves because the stronger the gymnast is mentally, the better she can perform under pressure.

“Often the girls can perform their routines with relative ease in training but once you add the pressure of competition, things don’t always go according to plan. Visualising a clean competition without major errors is a very effective tool to simulate the nerves you feel in competition.”

Roets Pelser coaches artistic gymnast Cailtin Rooskrantz, who represented South Africa at the Tokyo Olympic Games in 2020. She suffered a serious knee injury in 2017 which prevented her from competing in the Commonwealth Games. While recovering she watched videos of herself doing sequences and visualised to compensate for the lack of training. The proprioceptive signals between the brain and her body parts made her body believe it had exercised. Roets Pelser believes Rooskrantz’s ability to visualise her competition is one of her strengths and part of the reason she's successful.

Rooskrantz started gym at the age of six, but her parents noticed her talents early as she was an agile child, naturally flexible and strong. “I had all this natural ability to do all these weird things, like self-taught flips off the bed or into the pool. I was so flexible. My mom could also see in my physique that I was fit for a young child,” she says.

She makes giants and leaps look easy, but puts this down to the 28-plus hours spent in the gymnasium every week. “I don’t think any professional sport, no matter how good you are, is easy. It’s not like you glide to the top, even if you do have the potential. It took hours of hard work and crafting in the gymnasium for years before we started to see the results,” Rooskrantz says.

“At this high level there’s a lot of things that go into having an optimal performance. We have long seasons. This year our season started in March and we’re having our last big competition at the end of October. It’s a long year of preparing and competing, so there is a lot that goes into it.

“We have to look after our bodies, from eating habits to a healthy lifestyle. My mom, being a nurse, always brought healthy habits into the house. There’s recovery and maintaining your body. I see a physio twice a week, a biokineticist once a week, every two months I go to a chiropractor. Those are the different kinds of things  we have to do to keep on top of our recovery, as well as ice baths and heating our muscles and parts of our body that are sore,” she says.

MENTAL AND EMOTIONAL WORK

Exceptional proprioception isn’t enough to make an eminent athlete because when motivation slips it is mental and emotional fortitude that pulls an athlete through the dip.

As Rooskrantz says: “There’s a lot of mental and emotional preparation that goes into building athletes at this level. We do mental strengthening and work with psychologists. Gymnastics is a tough sport mentally. You train for hours on end, repeating routines a million times just to be able to go out onto that competition arena and perform it once as perfectly as you can. It takes a lot of positive self-talk to do that.”