Trail running guide at Girls on Hills and expert in proprioception Dr Keri Wallace looks at the role of proprioceptive training in preparing the body for hitting the trails

Make like a mountain goat on the trails. It just takes strength work and practice

Always fancied having a go at trail running? Before you strike out on the hills, have a think about whether you’re fit for purpose; it’s not just your cardiovascular fitness that will take a hit from the ups and downs of trail running.

The main diff erence between road running and trail running is the surface we run on. Tarmac may be hard and unforgiving, but at least it is stationary. When we run on trails, the ground underfoot can be soft , loose or unstable. This requires a lot more mental processing, and yet most of us can do it almost instinctively – thanks to proprioception.

‘Proprioception’ comes from a Latin word meaning unconscious perception of movement. It is the sixth sense by which we unknowingly track the position and movement of our joints, ligaments, muscles and tendons relative to our body at all times. Signals from specialised nerve cells (sensory receptors) in our muscles, skin and joints encode and feed back this information to our central nervous system. Here, we instantly compute how to synchronise activation of our muscles to move our limbs in a co-ordinated way. When combined with our other senses, we’re able to avoid obstacles and reduce impacts that can cause injury.

As runners, we fixate on strength, conditioning and form but oft en overlook proprioception as something we can train to improve performance.

“The idea of proprioceptive training is to condition your body to control its position relative to the environment and to react quickly when something unexpected happens. It is just as important to train this system as it is to train muscles to strengthen a particular joint,” says Mariam Kilpatrick, trail runner and Chartered Physiotherapist at Physio Eff ect clinic, Glasgow. “One example of proprioceptive training is standing on a wobble board to improve your natural balance and proprioceptive reactions. With repetition, you’ll transition from a conscious to a subconscious state. And with good proprioception comes responsiveness, precision-in-movement and greater physical awareness during running on uneven and technical trails,” she says.