The concept of balance seems like a simple one.   It is thought of as a static process where you are still like when you had to balance on one foot in grade school.  While you may appear still, your body is actually performing a series of very complex movements in order to “keep you balanced”.    By now, you may be asking yourself why is balance important?   Balance is a critical component to an athlete as well as everyone else for a variety of reasons.  Balance prevents injury.  Without good balance, we risk injury from everyday tasks such as walking, stair climbing, lifting our children, etc.    The athlete not only risks injury from all these factors but the stresses of his sport as well.   And an athlete with poor balance faces loss of power in his movements which affect performance.

So how do you improve your balance?   You do it with Neuromuscular stabilization training which is basically balance training.  Since your body does not exist on one plane of motion, in order to improve your balance you are not going to do it on one plane of motion.  That means you have to perform moves that challenge you.   There are some easy ways to add stability training to your current workout without adding a lot of moves.   First, stand up!   Yes, that is right.  Get off the weight machines, stop sitting and laying on the bench and stand up!  This puts your body in its natural position for balance.  Next, perform dynamic movements.   So instead of just doing squats up and down, try doing walking lunges or side lunges.  Again, putting your body in a position where it naturally balances the movement.   There are many steps to continually make the movement more challenging with products like bosu balls and stability balls.    In the end though, the concept is to take what your body would do naturally and enable it to train to be better at it.

So if you were a baseball player, you would be training for better balance when throwing, hitting, running and sliding to prevent injury and get more power and speed.   Same goes for a mother of small children who should be training for lifting, shifting loads from one arm to the other, etc.   And as we age, since our bodies lose balance naturally, it is a critical training component to prevent falls and fractures.

As we get older, we lose balance and we tend to be less active which gives us less opportunity to practice balance naturally.  That is why you see such horrible statistics on senior citizens having life altering falls and bone breakage.  They didn’t suddenly become clumsy or fall prone, their body just naturally was challenged less and less on having to balance and since a lot of this balance is a function of your brain as much as it is your body, these receptors just stopped providing the energy to your body for balance so it naturally declined.   Anyone can get it back, it isn’t like it is gone forever.  I have many senior clients who have better balance than some of the 20 year olds I see at the gym but that is from working on it and continuing to practice so if you are not adding any balance work to your routine, you should add some because it is an important factor and as you age, it will add to your quality of life dramatically.