How to Improve Balance - By Cruz Anthony
How to Improve balance. Effective science-based ways to improve the systems that control how stable and balance you are.
Balance is the core of all human movement. How well one walks stems from the ability to balance on one leg for a split amount of time. Improving your balance can improve strength, longevity, and injury resistance.
Below Are the key features that you should add into your workout regimen to improve balance and stability.
Tip #1 - Strength Training
The foundation of balance is strength. Focusing on exercises like step ups, sit to stands, and single leg balance are fundamental exercises that allow for huge progressions in balance if programmed correctly.
Underneath the visible skeletal muscles are stabilizer muscles that we recruit with daily activity. In order to improve those muscle groups, we need to focus on strengthening our daily activities in the gym. A simple exercise for this could be a suitcase carry with a kettlebell. This exercise offsets the body, requiring the stabilizer muscles to adapt to the stimulus.
Tip #2 - Visual and Vestibular Integration
Combining changes in your visual environment while doing static posture exercise can enhance your balance significantly. An example of this can be balancing on one foot, putting a sticky not on the wall in front of you, and moving the head side to side will keeping the eyes focused on the sticky note.
Balance requires the vestibular, visual, and somatosensory receptors to activate and maintain proper posture. Changing the environment so that the vestibular and visual systems are challenged will enhance your balance significantly.
Tip #3 - Dynamic balance and acceleration
Dynamic postural movements and acceleration train your vestibular system to handle changes in direction. This is directly correlated to everyday movements and sports. Working on sprinting and coming to a fast deceleration or walking and coming to a complete stop will enhance your vestibular systems ability to act in real life instances.
Tip #4 - Foot pressure and feeling
The intrinsic focus on foot pressure helps correct imbalances in movement and allows better real-life stability. Improving the ability to apply pressure with each step and increasing the strength that supports each step is what allows us to balance while walking or balance while exercising.
This can affect one's ability to hike, walk upstairs, step over a curb, paddleboard and many other extreme factors. Movements like squats and standing overhead press require the feet to remain connected to the ground for balance and recruitment of other muscles. Simple changes in exercises from seated to standing can be significant in improving balance.
Tip #5 - Unilateral and Bilateral exercises
Unilateral movements require the load to be placed on one side of the body. For example, a single arm dumbbell overhead press. This requires the opposing side of the body to compensate for the lack of weight. The compensation lies in the stabilizing muscle groups (core and leg musculature). This will therefor improve one's ability to balance while there are no stresses placed on one side rather than the other and improve one's ability to offset the opposing stimulus.
On the other hand, Bilateral movements have a stimulus on both sides of the body. Any exercise that requires load requires both skeletal muscles and stabilizer muscles to activate. This allows the body to adapt to the stimulus that it is put on it. Bilateral movements typically help build strength and therefor correlate to improving balance.