Learn how to actually “Listen to your body”... with science!
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In this episode, we explore the concept of 'listening to your body' and its significance, especially for pole dancers. The discussion covers the senses of proprioception (body's position in space) and interoception (internal body signals), and how understanding these can improve both dance and daily life. Research on perceptual learning reveals that improving proprioception through focused training, even in neurodivergent individuals, is both possible and beneficial. Practical tips include balance training, tactile feedback, and removing visual inputs to enhance proprioceptive acuity. Additionally, members and listeners are thanked for their support, with details on joining online classes provided.
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction to Listening to Your Body
01:34 Understanding Body Signals: Interoception and Proprioception
06:08 The Role of Neurodivergence and Hypermobility
07:26 Perceptual Learning: Enhancing Body Awareness
12:00 Practical Tips for Improving Proprioception
18:54 Conclusion and Class Information
Learn more about the vestibular system & balance: https://www.slinkthroughstrength.com/science-of-slink-podcast/how-to-do-spin-pole-without-getting-dizzy
Citations:
Aman, J. E., Elangovan, N., Yeh, I. L., & Konczak, J. (2015). The effectiveness of proprioceptive training for improving motor function: a systematic review. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 8, 1075.
Godde, B., Stauffenberg, B., Spengler, F., & Dinse, H. R. (2000). Tactile coactivation-induced changes in spatial discrimination performance. Journal of Neuroscience, 20(4), 1597-1604.
Gibson, E. J., & Walk, R. D. (1960). The" visual cliff". Scientific American, 202(4), 64-71.
Kapp, S. K. (2025). Sensory–movement underpinnings of lifelong neurodivergence: getting a grip on autism. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 19, 1489322.
Transcript:
Pole dancer. Has anyone ever told you to listen to your body and you've been like, I don't know what the hell that means. How am I supposed to do that? Does everyone know how to do that? Was I supposed to be born knowing how to do that? What? The good news is there's actually been a lot of research on listening to your body in general.
So both the sense of understanding from your body and also how to learn to get better at that. And that's what we're gonna talk about today. So we're gonna talk about. What information you're supposed to be 📍 getting, the sort of the perceptual background there. Uh, we're gonna talk about learning to perceive better, which is a specific type of learning.
Uh, and also some specific pointers and tips to help you learn how to listen to your body better, uh, which is a very, very useful and necessary skill for us as pole dancers. And also just general for like living your life in the world. It's very helpful.
Before we get into it too deeply, though, I do want to, you know what I'm gonna do, but thank my members.
Y'all are the best. And those are my Science of Slink. Members who are in, you know, me, ride or dies, they're there for all the classes. Really want the whole package. Uh, and also my essentials of SL members. It's a more lightweight membership. It's just an hour of class a week a little bit less of a time commitment, a little bit less of a financial commitment, but still showing up for themselves regularly.
Y'all are doing it, and I appreciate you and I hope you're having a nice day. I hope everybody's having a nice day, but yeah, about a little, a little extra, a little extra, uh, sprinkles on it for my members because they help make the podcast possible, which I really, really appreciate.
So let's start out. So when an instructor says, listen to your body, the specific thing that they're often trying to get you to notice is the sense of your body in space and also the information that you are getting from inside your body. So those two senses you know, the five senses a lie.
There's way more senses than that. You have a lot of senses. Um, and one of them is interception. So this is information that comes from the inside of your body. It tells you things like you need to breathe in, uh, you got tummy issues, uh, you're hungry, you're thirsty, you're tired. That's all part of your sense of interception, and those are are signals that come from within your body itself.
And then you also have proprioception, and this is the main thing that we're gonna be talking about today and proprioception is your sense of your body's position in space and also relationship to itself. A, uh, a sort of a task that you need ception to do.
Sort of one of the, the classic tests is, can you touch your finger to your nose? And if you can do that, it's because you understand where your nose is. You understand where your finger is, and you can correctly use that information to move your finger to your nose.
So the information that your body is getting to help you understand where you are in your space, a lot of that comes from mechnoreceptors.
So actual, little, little, I guess you can think of them as like, um, uh, sensing stations like the little weather stations all throughout your body. You have them in your skin, right? So if I flex my wrist, that actually stretches the skin here on the inside of my wrist, uh, and my body gives me feedback and that can help me figure out the angle of the joint Here you also have mechanical receptors in your muscles themselves sort of embedded in the muscle fibers.
Uh, they're also in ligaments and tendons, right? Uh, again, if we're sort of thinking about the hand. Hands, he of a lot going on. Right? But you have both ligaments and tendons, uh, sort of running and that you can, you can see a little bit if you sort of wiggle your hand and, and look at it. Uh. These aren't, these aren't muscles here on the back of your hands.
And also, uh, inside your bones and joints themselves, you're actually getting, uh, information from the joint capsule and position. So you're getting, you know, all this information, sort of the electrically being sed back to your brain. Do, do, do, do, do all the time from all over your body, inside your body.
And they're detecting different things, right? So they are detecting things like touch, things like pressure, um, stretching, like I mentioned, uh, vibration, uh, motion. And all of those things, uh, come together and are sent to your brain, which has to pick them apart. And when we say listening to your body, what we mean is correctly gathering information from all of those signals and interpreting it in your brain.
And that is a learned process. You are not actually born ,knowing how to do that. Uh, and a lot of the things that even like very young infants can do aren't the result of learning. They're the result of reflexes, right? So if you've ever, you, you know, you touch a baby's palm and the the fingers close, that is not a learned behavior.
That is a reflexive behavior that is innate, uh, and actually disappears. Right. 'cause I can, I can touch my palm and not close my fingers 'cause I'm an adult and I've lost that reflex.
You're also getting information from your inner ear and your vestibular system. Uh, and I have a whole episode where I go into a lot more detail on the mechanisms of the inner ear and the colia and balance and all that good stuff. Uh, so I'm not gonna get into it too detailed here, uh, but that also is giving you information about your sense of your body and space.
And also you're getting information from your visual system. Now, as your proprioception improves, you should need less information visually, right? It's sort of like it's a bonus.
It can help, but ideally you should get to the point where you don't need to rely on that. In a dance context, a lot of times, uh, dance studios will have mirrors, but if you are interested in performing dance. Often you will be in a space without mirrors. You're gonna have to learn how to rely on the other sources of information and not just visual input.
And a good way to sort of test how your prop percept is without visual input is if you close your eyes and you take your fingers and you try to touch your fingertips to each other in front of you. Oh, I actually did that really well without looking at what you're doing. Um, that is something that requires a fine degree of information and correction. Uh, and if you can't do it without the visual input, that's a good indication that, uh, you'd probably benefit from doing some perceptual learning for your proprioceptive systems.
Couple things to just be aware of. There's both a degree of individual variation, right? Have you learned how to do this or not? Um, but it's also something that's really affected by neurodivergence. So, um, we know that folks with autism do have sensory processing differences. But that does not mean that you cannot learn how to move and you cannot learn to incorporate this proprioceptive information.
Um, so this is from Cap 2025, uh, and I'm, I'm reading here. Uh, autistic people generally can learn new movements similarly, as well as non-autistic people, but through different, less intuitive mechanisms that require more focused attention. Um, so this might mean that if you are autistic, you may have to actively work to learn the skill proprioception. Uh, and you can probably do it to, you know, the, the same, uh, same degree as allistic people, but it might take more, more focused, dedicated attention. And we're gonna talk, uh, later on in the episode about some techniques that you can use for this.
Another thing that's gonna affect your proprioception is, you guessed it hypermobility, right? 'cause we've got sensors in the joints, right? In the cartilage, in the, the tendons and ligaments. If your cartilage is different, those receptors are also gonna be different, and it's just going to, uh, change the information that you're getting. And you're going to have, uh, a different experience in your body as someone who has the other type of collagen.
All right, so this brings me to perceptual learning. Al learning is one of those. Now this is one of those things that I like.
When I first learned about it, I was like, blah, mind blown. And, and one of my particular interests, we are not born being able to interpret the information that comes to us from outside in the world through our senses. That is a learned skill and it's something you can continue to learn throughout your lifetime.
So if you are familiar with the Visual Clifft experiment, this is probably one of the best known experiments in the, in the field. Uh, this is by Gibson Walk 1960. And basically they had a table that ended halfway through and there was glass over it when they continued. Uh, and what they did was they put babies on the, the wood part of the table and then they had the mom go to the other side of the table and be like, come here baby. There's a glass here, you are safe. And younger inferent were perfectly willing to climb onto the glass over what looked like a cliff. Uh, but older infants who had begun to be able to interpret the visual perception were like. Absolutely not. That's a three foot drop. I'm an infant. I'm not doing that right.
So as they began to develop and mature, they were able to take this perceptual information, the visual feedback, and be like, ah, that is a drop. I know what a drop looks like. I'm not going over that. But the very young infants hadn't yet done that degree of learning. Uh, and so just went ahead and did the thing.
Uh, they also did a sort of questionably ethical experiment with kittens, uh, where they raised some kittens with access to light and some kittens in like a dark box. Uh, and the kittens in the dark box didn't do this visual perceptual learning, uh, the way that the kittens and the light did, because they just didn't have that stimulus and input.
And later, don't worry, the cats were exposed to light again and they grew up normal and it, it was fine. Happy ending. I a little bit hard to get through the IRB these days, but it was, it was the sixties.
So the upshoot of this is that you have to learn how to take in this information that your, your body is giving you and process it in a way that can direct your behavior.
Um, and it is a very important part of motor learning. It's a very important part of learning to do new skills that often goes unspecified or undiscussed, particularly for allistic people for whom this happens sort of instinctually by, by trying things and repeating things. Um, and may require a little bit more focused, concentrated effort from, uh, autistic folks or, or folks with other neuro divergences.
You can get better at it. And there's a couple, again, sort of classic examples from the literature. Um, really skilled sommelier can taste the difference between, uh, a glass of wine from the first half of the bottle and the second half of the bottle. Sexing chicks is another, uh, very common example from literature.
Uh, and these are basically very young. Um. Chickens domestic chickens you want to be able to sort into male chickens and female chickens if you are trying to send somebody only female chickens in order for them to have a laying flock. Uh, so being able to detect the difference between those, uh, very difficult to perceive, but you can learn to do it.
Um, and you can learn to perceive, you know, again, very subtle fine distinctions over time. And the adaptation can actually happen pretty quickly, even just in cases of a couple hours of exposure. Uh, so, uh, God, uh, G-O-D-D-E 2000, um, had uh, was doing a two point discrimination test, and that's basically where you have two toothpicks or pencils or something. And you will have them you'll touch somebody with them simultaneously and you'll either use one or two and they're quite close together. Uh, and if you've never had anyone do this to you, it is pretty challenging to be able to distinguish how many points you've been touched.
If you haven't trained on this task before, and they found that in just a couple hours, uh, not only were people able to improve on this task, uh, but they could actually see in the brain. They were able to distinguish, uh, these sensations, uh, to a greater extent. So, cool visioning study.
I mean, if you're interested in visioning studies, you can go read it. But the point here is the adaptation can happen really quickly. It also goes away very quickly. So when they retested a couple weeks later, that adaptation had gone away completely. You need repeated stimulus of the thing that you're trying to learn to perceive in order to be able to build more long-term connections that that persist, which is probably what you want, right?
Especially if you're trying to understand where your body is in space so that you can do cool pole tricks.
Uh, with that said, we know that we can improve proprioception through this process of perceptual learning. What does that look like? Um, and I will say a lot of the literature on this actually looks at folks who have had strokes.
So it's more therapeutic recuperative than, uh, more on like the sort science performance enhancing side. Um. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about, uh, meta study. Mostly looking at that literature, but also just in general, propriocept training, and then some things that you can try in, in poll and see, see how they work for you.
Uh, this is from, uh, Aman, a MAN, uh, at all 2015. And all the citations are in the down there as usual. I'm, I'm not going to leave you hanging. I cite my sources.
Prop perceptive training resulted in an average improvement of 52% across all outcome measures. Um, and this is a meta study, so they were looking at a lot of different interventions and a lot of different outcome measures.
Uh, but the point is that specifically training the proprioceptive system and targeting, that seemed to work pretty good. Uh, and there were a number of things that they actually were looking at in terms of interventions.
Uh, so one was balance training, and I also, I also have an episode on balance training. So I'm gonna send you that. I'm not gonna, I don't wanna repeat myself, uh, but basically teaching yourself how to balance better. It works, it improves your sense of your body and space. Uh, it improves your balance, which is really important, especially as we get older. And again, pretty strong evidence that you can train it and it gets better.
Um, they also looked at multi-joint active movements. So these are something that we might call a compound movement. On the more exercise science side. Good news for y'all, most of what we do in poll is a multi-joint active movement. Pole is a very full body movement. I, y'all know this, right?
So it's rare that you're doing you know, just something with just your bicep, you know, if, if we think about even, uh, a movement that would, uh, use the biceps like, um, I guess eccentrically, uh, coming back from a, a pole crunch to an invert. You're also using the agonist, using the triceps. You're using your core you're using you know, your, your hip flexors, you're using your hamstrings a little bit.
Uh, you're definitely using your back muscles, getting to those rhomboids, middle traps. Possibly lots, a little bit. Well, lots of stabilizers. Definitely. So. Very difficult to do anything in pole that is not a multi-joint active movement. So I would say like just doing pole is going to improve your proprioception.
Again, from mono, neuro divergent folks, autistic folks, you may need to spend more time thinking about it and focusing on it specifically. Uh, another thing that, uh, seems to work pretty well is vibration therapy. So if you're familiar with like thera guns or like massagers, uh, people use them in recovery a lot.
I think the evidence for recovery is I don't know that it's gonna necessarily be more helpful than anything else that will increase blood flow from my understanding of the literature. I'm not a non-medical doctor. This is not medical advice. Uh, I'm not saying anything about therapeutics.
Talk, talk to your doctor about that. But it does seem to help with proprioception training, uh, specifically. So applying, uh, a, a vibrating, you know, like a, the guide or something object to the area where you're going to try and help people create a greater connection to. 'cause remember, some of those mechanical receptors are specifically looking for vibrations.
So sort of waking them up and being like, we're vibrating should help. Um, and also discrimination training. So like I talked about with the two point discrimination task, uh, or other tasks where you're really challenging your, your intentionally challenging your proprioceptive sense, uh, and trying to, get it better and better and better.
So, uh, uh, an example that we might do from, from poll or that, uh, I think is, kind of cognitive more of the exercise science is, you're trying to say target a specific angle of a movement, right? Or, or a specific plane of movement. Uh, for example, in, uh, in a lunge, you know, if you have your feet staggered and you're trying to come down, generally you don't want your torso to really lean to one side the other.
You wanna be moving in. Single plane of movement and being able to be like, okay, yes, I'm, I'm keeping myself, you know, parallel to the walls as opposed to going off one direction or the other. Being able to discriminate between those is, is that sort of training, um, or handstands, really great example.
Uh, so much of handstands is finding a specific shape, upside down, and of course upside down. You're challenging your vestibular system, right? You're really changing the input from that system. Uh, part of the reason why suddenly things when you are upside down. It might start to make a little bit less sense to your brain.
'cause you're, you're dealing with a bunch of new perceptual input from the vestibular system in addition to, big inputs from the skin, big inputs from the skin, you know, especially depending on what you're doing in addition to, you know, oh, I'm trying to do motor learning. I'm trying to figure out this thing that's new to me.
Some options some other things that this might like, translate a little bit to more easily in poll class. One thing that I like to do is, is introduce, you know, haptics, you know, vibrations type of haptics, but just touch pressure. And particularly if we're working in my flexibility class, those Yahoo 10 class meal will know I do this.
I will during the warmup. Offer you the option to specifically palpate the muscle that we're gonna be working with, right? So you have that pressure and you're beginning to bring that, uh, mind body connection. You're starting to build that proprioception.
Another way that haptics can be really helpful is, uh, if you're working on your balance, actually stimulating the bottom of your foot with different textures.
Because one of the things that we're doing when we're balancing is we are taking that information from pressure sensors on the bottom of our foot and using that to adjust our position in space. Uh, and a lot of that happens automatically. But particularly as we age, particularly if we're not making, you know, demands on the bottom of our foot, we're not, uh, interacting with that skin, especially if we wear shoes all the time.
You may begin to lose acuity in that, uh, sort of representation. Uh, so making, little tactile demands on the bottom of your feet, uh, can help there. Uh, I might also recommend trying different clothing that have sort of a novel sensory stimuli. Uh, might help you, uh, begin to again, sort of haptics touching, uh, might help you begin to, uh, focus more on different parts of your body.
Caveat here. If you have sensory issues and like, uh, wearing something very textured, feels bad and makes you upset, don't do it. Don't do it. But if you don't mind it, right? Even something like, I'm really trying to think about what my biceps are doing in this positions. Go back to biceps.
Uh, maybe I'm going to wear a shirt that has tighter sleeves around the biceps, so I'm getting a little bit more pressure and feedback there. It might be helpful, uh, to just shake things up a little bit, give you a little bit of novel stimulus.
And also generally if we're trying to increase our, uh, perceptual learning proprioception, removing the vision component. So if you usually train with the mirror, try covering the mirror. If you usually, you know, filming yourself and watching yourself as you're, feel yourself, use the back camera, uh, so that you can't, you can't see yourself, uh, and you don't get that visual feedback. So you're having to rely more on your proprioceptive feedback to understand your positioning in space.
All right. That was a big whole long thing. Just to remind you. When we say listen to your body, what we mean is tune into your sense of proprioception, your understanding of your body's position, and sace tune into your interception, your sense, uh, of things from inside your body. And those are trainable, uh, particularly proprioception.
You can, through the process of perceptual learning, get better at perceiving finer grain distinctions from your body and your positioning in space. Uh, and then finally, some, some suggestions for how to do that. The next time somebody says, listen to your body, now you know what they mean. And again, for some people this learning process is just very intuitive.
It just sort of happens when they move. Uh, for other folks it may take more concerted effort, and if it takes you a little bit longer, that's fine, right? We're learning, we're giving our brand new stimulus, we're trying new things. Uh, we're exploring what it is to have a body, and isn't that part of the pointed pull, right? Exploration and fun and trying stuff out and learning new things and challenging ourselves. So, if this is something that has frustrated you in the past, totally understand and hopefully if you run into it again in the future, you end up being a little bit less frustrated.
So that's what I've got for you today. I hope this has been illuminating. You've learned some things. Uh, if you wanna come dance with me, I teach online. I teach six classes a week, uh, at times that should hopefully work for a bunch of different time zones. And, uh, actually my essentials of Slink membership, uh, if you're interested in trying it out, I got a little coupon code for you down there and my membership essential of sync is $45 a month. One of my drop in classes, hour long drop in classes is $35.
I'm giving you a $10 off coupon. You could try a month of classes. The cost of one class, pretty good deal. I think if you're interested I'd love to have you come join us, and if not, no worries. I'll see you in the next episode. Either way, have a good one and I'll talk to you very soon. Bye.
