Test Your Body Awareness

To hit a tennis ball or dance the merengue you need sharp eyes and a good ear. But there’s also another rarely discussed sense at work: proprioception, or body awareness. While it’s not one of the classic five senses, body awareness is crucial to moving and aging with grace. And it can be trained.

This sense is what tells you where your body is in space, and it’s always on, said Katherine Wilkinson, a neurobiologist at San Jose State University, who studies the basic science behind it.

When you reach for a cup of coffee, neurons and tissues embedded in your muscles, joints and tendons sense they’re being stretched, rotated or bent. This information travels to your brain, helping you coordinate your arm and hand. Elite gymnasts, dancers and football players tend to have particularly acute body awareness, but it also helps the rest of us recover after a slip.

Because these organs (known as proprioceptors) are in your muscles and tendons, your body awareness can be impaired or lost if you sprain your ankle or tear your rotator cuff. But it can be retrained by movement, which is part of why physical therapy is so important for a damaged joint or tendon, said Claire Morrow, a physical therapist with Hinge Health, a virtual clinic for muscle and joint pain.

Your body awareness naturally declines with age, increasing your risk of falls. This tends to make people more hesitant to move, said Jia Han, a professor of physiotherapy at Shanghai University of Medicine and Health Sciences. And so a vicious cycle begins: When you move less, your body awareness deteriorates, which prompts you to move even less. But there are several exercises that some small studies suggest can help improve your balance, stability and gait by enhancing awareness of your position and movement.

Doctors and physical therapists use specialized equipment to assess proprioception, but you can get a general sense of yours with two simple tests.

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