This leads to more trauma, deaths, and injuries than car crashes.

Why should you care about improving your balance? Preventing pain and injury is a pretty good one for sure.

There are also other benefits to improving your balance according to Dr. Kathren Forth like:

1. Better Reaction Time

2. Better Coordination

3. Ability to do activities and chores

4. Greater Mobility

5. Better Performance

6. Better Quality of Life

There are 5 actions you can take to improve your balance.

1. Challenge the senses:

   1. Eyes, Feeling, Pay attention to your body

   2. Are you picking up your feet?

2. Make it dynamic

   1. You need movement with control to improve your balance

3. Focus on your feet

   1. Being barefoot

      1. Helps you increase the sensations to your brain which results in better feedback

      2. Getting a foot massage is very important to activate messages to the brain, and reduce muscular atrophy (Wow! Who would of known?)

4. Quantify

   1. Doing different tests like the Tandrum walk test, Timed Stand, Walk-Thru Cones, and Sit Back Down test (follow the links for examples).

   2. There are many other tests are great to help you improve your balance. Leave a comment with what you are looking for and I will recommend something specific.

5. Posture

   1. Without even realizing it, as people age, they start to look down and lean forward. This will create a higher risk of falling.

6. Core work

   1. This is different than ab training. Your core is made up of your trunk and hip muscles. These muscles are deep which help you stabilize your spine or pelvis.

When I train someone to strengthen their core, I do more standing exercises, and movement type exercises. Abs are the muscles you see more outer part of the abdominal muscles that when your bodyfat is low you can see these muscles. The abs are still important, but training the deeper abdominals muscles which I refer to as the core muscles help more with movement balance and function.

Here is a video of a man I have been working with on balance. I have set up a variety of cones for him to walk through, some are higher than others. As he walks thru and over the cones, you can see that walking thru the cones helps him to lengthen his stride. Our stride gets smaller and our hamstring muscles get shorter, greatly affecting our balance. This is a great way to lengthen those hamstring muscles and stride, which gives you more mobility.

I hope this helped you and maybe motivated you to take action and improve your balance.

Please feel free to email me any questions.

Information provided by Dr. Kathren Forth. She has a doctorate in motor control and conducted a postdoctoral fellowship at NASA. She is an expert in postural stability and has created award-winning balance training programs for older adults. Zibrio’s products measure physical balance and also provide a balance specialist training course for personal trainers who want to help clients maintain or improve their balance as they age.