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Hi everybody, welcome to the ChiroSecure Facebook live, Look to the Children’s show. I am your host for today, Dr. Monika Buerger here, and I’m going to bring you the power of proprioception. So why did I want to focus on proprioception is amazing. Um, one of our most amazing tools for the brain. Yeah. Actually tools for the brain. I like that. So, first of all, thank you, ChiroSecure for giving this platform and giving the chiropractic profession, this platform, um, to, um, reach out and educate all of you. Amazing docs on, uh, the wonders of chiropractic. So, um, let’s dig in and dive in. I am in the know and show you some slides right now. Just so you have a little bathroom reading. Uh, usually I bring Elizabeth on the show with me, but Elizabeth is home and I am at an undisclosed workcation location. Yes. Um, I’ve had some fun this week out on the road speaking, and then speaking, um, at a private event.
And I’m here with you today to talk about proprioception proprio body self perception of ourself. Proprioception is one of our, one of our interoceptive internal senses. So I wanted to bring you a little information with regards to the little fiddle farts and why this is so important that proprioception is information from our joints and our muscle spindles, um, and actually the vestibular labyrinth, the inner ear, but in your practices, you might see these kiddos present as what I call the pull push punch kiddos, because it gives us a sense of self, self, and force. Proprioception is a lot about how much force do we use, um, to carry ourselves through space and to do things that require movement. So things like kicking a ball like writing, like sitting up tall, like moving through space. Um, so these are all extremely important. Um, things that require proprioception, um, probably a perception tells us the rate, the timing of how to do things.
So movement is all about rate and timing and how to move myself through space. Propioception lets us know where our body is in space and where, how big my body like to be able to move through small spaces or a doorway. So if I don’t know where I am in space, I might knock into walls or run into doorways things where I cannot fit my body appropriately through space. So that gets to be a little bit scary and really who wants to move through space and time or do things that can be scary to the brain. That’s when these little fiddle farms will retreat, um, and um, actually go, it causes us anxiety in our everyday normal movement in life. So, um, think about this. If you had two boxes, you had two boxes, same size look exactly the same. And I said, go pick the one box up, but you couldn’t judge how much it weighed.
Okay. In your brain, in your mind, you are perceiving. You’re thinking that I’m going to need to hold my body in such a manner and ground myself and my feet go here. And my arms go here because I need to handle this load because you’re thinking that box weighs a lot of weight and you pick it up and you fall flat on your butt because it doesn’t weigh a whole lot. So that creates a memory and your thing that can be scary. So think of a little fiddle fart that goes to pick a toy or pick something up. And when they do, they fall out on their flat on their booty or a flat on their face. That’s scary. So the next time they go to do that, they’re gonna be hesitant, creates anxiety. We have to be able to register in our brain, how much something weighs, how do, how does my body have to maneuver and change its position in order to handle that weight?
And that’s learned over time that is learned over things like tummy time and rolling and creeping and crawling these things that give us input. So we know how to move our body through space. If that doesn’t happen, we live on the subconscious most sensory input about 98% is on a subconscious level, only 2% on a conscious level. So subconsciously we’re living kind of in a fight or flight state all the time. So if I don’t have this feedback from my joints and my muscles and have good posture to create this feedback, then I’m can be living in a subtle state of Lowline anxiety all the time. And of course we know that leads to stress, which leads to depletion of nutrition’s immune system, integrity, the whole, uh, the whole gamut, like I’ve talked about before. So what do we see in our opposites? What they, what these little fiddle parts might present, like they can be your low kiddos, um, your floppy kiddos, your chronic poor posture.
These kiddos can be frustrating because we as chiropractors, we’re interested in posture, postural integrity. Um, and these little kiddos can always chronically present with this poor posture. Um, and so we can adjust them till the cows come home, but they are not registering in the brain how to hold their spirit, their body in space, by the way, in order for good propioception to develop, we need things like good nutrition, like not the standard American diet, the sugar holics and carbon Tarion’s. We need some protein to have the building blocks to in order for those muscles to have, um, have some integrity in order for them to fire and be strong enough. Proprioception is this continuous ongoing loop to the brain. It should be automatic with good posture. So these kiddos that are low tone and floppy their, their Mo their Mo a lot is they’re just tired.
I’m tired all the time. I don’t feel like doing that. I’m tired. So our hyper proprialceptive kiddos, we can be hyper meaning. A little bit of input goes a long way. A little bit of force, a little bit of use of our body will, um, overtax the system quickly, or we can be hypo. I say, hyper is like a small cup of coffee that you fill up. And, um, you can get, you can get that coffee cup full fast, like, uh, caffeine high, fast, whereas hypo is not an episode, this big, giant cup of coffee that you can never fill up enough copy to get enough caffeine. So your hyper kiddos, these your low tone, your floppy kiddos, they get exhausted just moving through gravity. They have a hard time with things like, um, writing, like, um, sports, like, um, hand-eye coordination. They ha they clumsy all the time.
They trip over themselves. Some of these kids are so hyper. Um, proprialceptive in nature that they’re actually, I get kiddos that are actually in their classroom seats at school, and they’re falling out of their classroom seats. They can’t even, they don’t even know where they are in space and they just talk all over. Um, they have trouble with things like jumping Jackson. All you have to do is lime kiddos up go to a, uh, a kindergarten classroom or go to a church line your five-year-old’s up and ask them to, uh, hop to jump with both feet off the ground to do a jumping Jack. If they can’t do those things, they have poor proprialceptive integrity. So, um, they might not have good hand dominance by about the age of five. We should have one hand dominance. Okay. So your hypo kiddos, they’re not getting enough feedback.
Your hyper kiddos are getting too much feedback. It’s too fast. And too fear is coming in. You’re hypo. Kiddos are it’s like the elevator’s not going to the top. They’re not getting that information into the brain. These kiddos want the input propioception is calming. It’s centering and helps us screen out other chaos in our environment. So we seek that out. If we’re not getting it, I say it probably assumptions like this little balloon, that’s just floating in space. If you don’t have it, you’re just floating through space, not really having an anchor or a core or an awareness of who you are. Now, if you don’t have an awareness of who you are, you can’t connect with others. You can’t connect with your own inter body and where your body starts and stops. You can’t connect with others. So you might have, see these kiddos have a hard time connecting socially with others.
And these kiddos will want that feedback to build calm and secure in their environment. So that’s why I call them your pull punch, push kiddos. Um, they can be labeled as bullies sometime. They look, they seek out. They like to crash into beds and jump on sofas and Lila trampolines. So they might be in your offices cause they’re getting hurt. Cause they’re on the trampolines all the time. Um, they might like tight snug places, like sometimes a wedge themselves between the wall and a sofa or under thick blankets. This is where the whole weighted blanket thinking that blanket thing has come from people. Um, you see them for dolts now the weighted blankets that started initially with the autism world, because it is giving them that propioceptive feedback to know where they are and then it’s calming for them. It probably exception is less than if it’s lacking either on the hyper or hyper and hypo hyper or hypo.
That’s what happens. I’ve worked Haitian brain right now. Um, so on either end of that, um, if vision, if your visual integrity is off, proprioception is supposed to take over. It’s supposed to help you ground and know where you are in space. So let’s take sleeping when your eyes are closed. Your brain doesn’t know where you are in space, but it should on the subconscious level, right? So that’s where the weighted blankets and these heavy, heavy squeezing, um, environments help granted you, okay. So they might want to chew on things a lot bite bite, pinched chew. If you see these characteristics, you should be red, flagging it in your brain. Uh, is this child lacking proprioception? Well, the cool thing is, is we know that the joint receptors are loaded, loaded, loaded, loaded with proprioception. Um, so when we do it chiropractic adjustment, that is essentially feeding that information, that proprioceptive information into the brain, enhancing its neurological integrity and affording that person, that proprioceptive input.
That’s why, you know, we have these reports in our incredible profession about people feeling more calm and centered, um, and overall better after they get adjusted. It’s because it’s like resetting that part of your brain. These kiddos now what’s cool is, is, is just talking to them or the parents. One question I like to ask is, do you like sports? Oh, does your kiddo like sports? Oh yeah. They love sports. What kind of sports? Oftentimes these kiddos will want. They’ll like wrestling and football, those fast fears, heavy impact sports where they’re firing up that information from their joints and muscle spindles to give them that feedback. But the follow-up question, I like to ask to parents, not to kiddos because we don’t want to make the kiddos feel less than, but with the parents, I like to ask. Okay, awesome. That they like sports. How, how good are they at sports?
Not so good at things like baseball or maybe soccer or basketball because the hand eye coordination stuff can be harder on them. Anything where, uh, even with football and wrestling all day, they might like them. They might not be really good at them because they don’t know how to move their body through space, but they like that input. So these are a little golden nuggets, some questions you can ask to say, Hmm, what is their proprioceptive, neurological integrity, and then posture and movement in order to sit up straight and move through space, we need good proprioception again on a subconscious level level, always feeding forward into the brain. So these kiddos might be clumsy, have poor posture. And as I’ve talked about before this pastoral stability, which is critical for pro for the brain to feel comfortable where it is in space, where is, and how to, how to, uh, respond to people and to situations.
This is first and foremost in the world of, um, mental health and, and neuropsychiatric disorders. So motor functioning is becoming fast known in the neural development world as a predictor of interest, predictor of interest for such things as autism or neuropsychiatric illnesses. So if we see this lack of knowing how to move the body through space early on, and we get them under regular care, regular chiropractors care and we help build up and foster good muscle tone with things such as living, let’s get some more protein into these kiddos. Let’s make sure they’re getting the building blocks for proprioception.
Um, and the other really strategic building Brock is understanding how proprioception actually develops in the first year of life. This is an extremely important point here, given the paradigm that we’ve lived in this last year and a half with masking, the building blocks for propioception are, um, good nutrition, non subluxated spines. So that feed, uh, feed forward information into the brain and, um, oral motor control Proteus exception starts by oral motor control. And that’s by watching others, especially the Clare caretakers, especially mom, without autumn mask watching her, her aura, motor movements, oral motor, no proprioception is the first thing that builds. It’s the first thing that develops and ends the first year of life, which by the way, is also going to build bagel tone and our social engagement system. After the first year, propioception develops from face down and that’s more through art, some of our movements that we have to go through on these developmental milestones.
So take home message here. We want to make sure parents, especially mom and dad are educated on the importance of that social engagement and oral motor movements with the little one to help foster development and that first year of proprioception. Um, and then after the first year we look at things again, um, like developmental milestones, like tummy time. Um, did they do tummy time when the best things you can do is get mom and baby or dad and baby, tell me to tell me eye to eye face to face doing, um, some oral mode, expressive engagement. Proprioception is becoming looked at as one of the key indicators of, um, mental health. So I just threw this paper in there because I found it very fascinating that researchers are looking at using proprioception as an indicator, the integrity of proprioception as an indicator for, um, mental health.
So it’s fun step it. We understand again, every time we fire those, um, those, those deep joint, um, muscle spindles, we are firing that input into the brain and we know that that’s going to actually lead to a long lasting input, um, of executive functioning skills. So what I want you to do is in that first year life a look at getting these kiddos under chiropractic care, be educating mom, if she’s breastfeeding on, um, nutritional good nutritional components, especially protein, which is going to be the building blocks blocks for amino acids, then good, uh, muscle integrity, building proprioception, a good microbiome. The microbiome is very much tied into proprioceptive development. We want to watch baby tummy time, get baby to make sure baby’s in tummy time. Make sure baby goes to rolling by nine months, ish nine to 11 months, 11 months is able to be on all fours, rocking back and forth with good integrity.
If they’re collapsing at this point, if they cannot hold a four point rock on hands and feet on hands and knees with good tone, if they collapse or they have low tone in the shoulders and the proximal muscles, you need to worry about long-term implications of potential, low proprioceptive integrity. We want to make sure they four point creep cross crawl pattern. So looking at these milestones building, um, fueling the power of proprioception is going to be hands down key for building and fueling the future integrity of these for these little kiddos. So the other thing we want to understand is creating a safe environment and it loses in two factors, a creating a safe body environment. When we do the adjustment kiddos with poor sensory processing and poor proprioception may, um, fight the adjustment and we never want to adjust into chaos. We want to make sure that their neurological integrity is a safe and sound and calm as possible in order to when we do that adjustment that we minimize any potential repercussions from that it, as far as safety goes in, is in for chiropractic and the pediatric population.
Um, the, the biggest risk or side effect has been shown to be soreness, but we also want to try to minimize that potential factor. So we don’t want a child that’s tense and guarding. So adding some proprioceptive input, which I’m going to show you here in just a second, can I help to create a calm, safe environment of that little fiddle, farts, body integrity. But also if we give them some proprioceptive input, they may be able to screen up other chaos in our opposites or other sensory, um, input that might be causing them some anxiety, which again, is going to help them relax and receive that adjustment because we always want to adjust in a calm and not chaos. Um, and this is going to minimize your potential risk factors too. So one thing we can do is we can do some deep joint compression.
I start with right here, I start with the wrist and we’re just doing a, um, a distraction and compression kind of pumping action of the wrist. And you might want to stop there. I do maybe five pumps, again, distracting, compressing, distracting compressing. And I put up a pretty good grip, you know, um, not, not a strenuous force, um, when I’m, grapping grasping, but I’m a pretty good grip. And then I’ll move up to the elbow. And I do this on both sides left, left arm, right arm, um, wrist, elbow, and just give them some, um, w we got an office. We come squeezies, it’s calming. And then you can just work your way up the arm and just do some joint, just do some compression all the way up and down the arm that is very calming. This can also help you get that, um, that incredible adjustment without them fighting you.
And then the other thing that I have parents do at home, if I’m seeing a low tone kiddo, um, not liking tummy time, I’m not liking a lot of, um, soft touch proprioception will help, um, those kiddos that don’t like a lot of soft light touch. It’s more calming than light touch. So I’ll have parents do this at home, but I might do this in the office as well before doing an adjustment again. Okay. So for some extra proprioception, what we can do is what I call lateral stretches. You’re going to just start opposite arm, opposite leg and gently traction and hold for like 10 to 20 seconds. And then you’ll do the opposite side and then, you know, do same side. This just helps, um, with what we call body positional and proprioception, but knowing we have two sides of the body, um, and then it gives some proprioception as well.
So you do that. And then if you have an extra person on hand, one would do the arms and one would do the lights at the same time. Um, like, um, you know, the quarter horses kind of thing. So that is, um, lateral, these stretches for bilateral, um, awareness and or body positional awareness, knowing you have both sides of body, as well as some proprioception. So there we go, Elizabeth actually made the cut. She didn’t get it. She didn’t get to travel with me and my suitcase this time, but she made the cut on video. So again, take home pearls, proprioception the power proprioception, huge input into the CNS for calming allows us to know where we are in space, how to move through space, how safe we are through space, lets us know where our body is and do we have a right side and the left side and how to use that, how to create lateral reality.
So I can get a dominant side, a dominant hand dominant foot, which is less chaos on the brain. Um, it helps us, um, to screen out other sensory chaos and, and to calm the sensory storm we can be in. So, um, those hopefully are some take home pearls. Again, you want to advocate tummy time, good diet connection, social connection with, especially with mom in that first year of life and without a mask. And, um, and to understand that proprioception is, um, upregulated with that amazing chiropractic adjustment. So screen your kids for proprioception, understand, um, some of the signs and symptoms, if they’re low appropriate reception. And um, I want to thank ChiroSecure for again, giving us this amazing platform to get our message out, to, um, to show you the power of chiropractic. Um, Dr. Erik Kowalki will be with you the first Tuesday of my gosh next month of July already the first Thursday, excuse me, first Thursday of July. And I will be back the third Thursday of July to, um, give you some more incredible information on the power of chiropractic for kiddos until then have a great rest of the month and keep changing lives and changing the future.
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