The Power of Touch
By Robert Kjemhus, Kinesiologist, BHKIN
If you’ve watched the summer Olympics recently then you’ve already noticed the brightly coloured tape that seems to be on every athlete. I’ve recently had a few people ask me about its purpose and whether it was there to provide structural support. My answer is that it does provide support, but not in the way you might think.
From 1996 to 2004, researchers in Greece reported that of the 1 out of every 3 elite track and field athletes who had a lateral ankle sprain (202) reinjured themselves within 24 months. To avoid reinjury, the researchers stressed the importance of a training program that increased joint proprioception. You can think of proprioception as a sense similar to touch. It is your nervous system keeping track of where your limbs are in relation to one another, as well as the world around them. When you receive an injury or intense pain, it can disrupt the feedback your nervous system is getting from the skin and mechanical muscle receptors but it doesn’t necessarily decrease the force in the tissues. In the last blog, I wrote about your nervous system’s stubborn desire to perform routine movements the way it always has, even if that puts more force and stress through the tissues surrounding the injury. So now you have an injured limb with more force potentially going through it and your nervous system doesn’t have a great idea of where your limb actually is. Sounds like a recipe for injury.
If you’ve ever had your ankle taped for a sport, then you know how incredibly restricting it can initially be. 15 minutes of intense activity later though, and your nice sturdy tape job is nothing more than a very fitted sock. But a good tape job still prevents the likelihood of re-injuring your ankle by 71% and even outperforms the use of a brace. So how does the tape help? One study concluded that “increased cutaneous sensory feedback provided by strips of athletic tape applied across the ankle joint of healthy individuals [helped] improve ankle joint position perception.” Other studies have even shown an increase in grip strength as well as an increased vertical jump.
In order to take what we’ve learned about taping and apply it to our training, I need to emphasize the benefit of giving your nervous system more information. In this case, that information is touch. When I begin working with clients, a lot of time is spent relearning what may seem like easy movements. If I asked someone on the street whether they could move their hips without bending their back, most people would (incorrectly) say yes. But when a hand is placed on their back and the move repeated, it quickly becomes apparent what is actually happening in the spine. This is why I encourage every client to imitate the olympians and add a little touch into their workouts. Have a muscle that’s not firing the way you want it to? Place a hand on it. Hip keeps rolling every time you try to move your femur? Put a hand on the joint and give your nervous system the information it’s looking for.
