Exercises to improve your balance.
Let’s have some fun. Stand on one leg. Tricky? Maybe… Now close your eyes.
How did you go? It’s no secret that balance can be tough, but if you’re sitting there wondering what on earth happened between that 10 year old you who climbed trees with ease and the 2020 version who can’t stand on one leg with their eyes closed for more than one second… let’s explain this balancing act once and for all.
Why balance?
Balance is an essential part of our overall fitness. It’s just as important as the strength, power, flexibility, and endurance aspects of fitness. We need good balance to stay on our feet and be able to perform our daily tasks and leisure activities. Without balance, we’d find it very hard to stay upright on two feet and ultimately, fall down. Our ability to balance is affected when we injure ourselves. It is particularly affected with lower limb injuries, such as ankle ligament sprains and fractures. These types of injuries affect the body’s ability to know where your joints and limbs are in space - a phenomena known as ‘proprioception’. When we lose this ability, we need to retrain it to ensure we get back to full fitness.
It is important to know that a large aspect of balance relates to the proper functioning of our vision and inner ear systems, which is a whole other topic on its own! But when it comes to proprioception, take a look at the following exercises to help improve your balance and strengthen those stabilising muscles and ligaments.
Exercises
Let’s get you started with some easy to incorporate exercises for everyday life:
Stand up from a chair without using your hands: Try this one on different chair types. But no pushing off with the hands! Get your centre of balance right and push up with those legs to stand upright.
Stand on one leg: You can do this pretty much anywhere, at any time. We suggest standing on one leg when you are brushing your teeth. That’s two lots of two-minute single leg stands every day. Easy! Want to make it harder? Try some one-legged squats or touch your toe with your opposite hand while balancing on one foot (not with your toothbrush in your mouth though!) 😊
Walk heel-to-toe: Imagine you are in the circus on a tightrope, walking in a straight line. Spend some time each day walking this way to challenge and improve your ability to balance. It’s harder than you think.
OK, let’s step it up a bit:
Draw a star: No we don’t mean with a pencil and paper. Stand in an open space and imagine you are standing in the middle of a six or eight-point star. Standing on one leg, try to toe-tap your way around the points of the star in a clockwise and then anti-clockwise direction. Try it on both legs. When this gets easy, do the same exercise standing on a pillow or cushion to make the surface you are standing on less stable. Much harder!
Stand on a wobble board/bosu ball: You’ll need to get yourself one first! These little devices are great at testing your balance limits with their flat tops and curved bottoms. You may fall off quickly to begin with, but keep trying and you’ll improve in no time. A few minutes a day is all it takes.
Close your eyes: Now that we’ve worked up to this one properly, let’s give it another go. This exercise is designed to really test you, and it will also make you realise how much we rely on our vision to keep our balance. Take away that vision and you are really challenging your proprioceptive capabilities. You can try any of the above exercises again with your eyes closed to make them even harder.
We recommend that anyone wanting to improve their balance come and see us first for an assessment so we can prescribe you safe exercises to follow. Some of these exercises may not be suitable for everyone. If you want to try them, do them next to a tabletop or have someone close to you, so if you lose balance whilst performing them, you have a safety net. Better still, have a little competition with us on the eyes-closed challenge next time you’re in! Did someone say ‘winner gets a coffee’? 😜