How to Stay on Track With Your Balance Goals
We’re past the halfway point in the year: all too soon, Fall will be here and then the months quickly slide into the winter Holiday season. So how are you doing? Are you on track to succeed at what you dreamed about in the fresh new days of the year?
If you are, then congratulations! You are part of a small minority of people who achieve their New Year’s goals. If not, fear not, we have some helpful advice for how to assess where you are, get back on track, or change the goal completely, to one you can get behind for the rest of the year.
First, take a look at how specific your balance goal was. If you said you wanted to ‘work on my balance,’ what exactly did you mean by it? How will you know if you’ve succeeded? And surely the purpose of working on balance is to improve it. So if you did one balance exercise once a month, you could technically say you succeeded in ‘working’ on it, but it won’t have improved in just seven sessions over as many months.
You have probably read about how to set SMART goals (goals which are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound). And while this formula can work, recent research suggests that the “business-derived SMART goal formula seems to produce better results for office managers than for people striving to improve their health” (Psychology Today).
Part of the reason is that health goals are strongly affected by our habits, self-beliefs, and emotions. And the SMART formula doesn’t make allowances for this. Which is why, if you’ve ever been coached for anything, at some point, your coach will likely have talked about what motivates you, what you care about and what you believe. Leaning into that subjectivity can be a powerful tool. The article above calls this new approach SUCCESS.
Let’s revisit your motivation for why you thought improving your balance was a good goal to have this year. Sometimes we have a vague idea that we should be doing something, like ‘everyone over 50 should work on their balance.’ But for us to be successful, we need to have a personal and specific reason that we’re clear about.
For example, maybe you’ve recently felt unsteady on your feet, which is scary, and you want to feel confident as you move around in daily life. Or maybe you want to be fit enough to hang out with younger family members and keep up with them. Or maybe you’ve been injured or recovering from illness or surgery and want to rehabilitate your body, building it back to strength (and possibly even stronger than before).
Pause a moment and think about what better balance would mean for you, and how you’ll feel when you have achieved it (e.g. “I will move around easily, inside and outside my home, without feeling worried”).
How do you feel about your balance today? Rate your confidence in being able to perform your goal activity on a scale of 1-10. How does that compare to how you felt at the start of the year? If you’ve made some improvement, take a moment to congratulate yourself on the progress you’ve made. If you haven’t, or you now feel worse, can you explain why? Perhaps balance training was more difficult or more boring than you expected. Perhaps something else has made it a lower priority.
If you have access to a ZIBRIO Stability scale, how has your actual balance measurement changed over this time? Remember, physical exercise is just one part of the picture, there are Six Pillars of Balance which affect your body’s ability to move around safely, including how well you sleep, what medical conditions you’re managing, and what medications you’re taking. Sometimes one pillar will have an outsized effect on your balance, meaning you have to work harder at the others to make up the difference.
But generally speaking, our balance system is very adaptable. Even well into the 80th decade and beyond, research shows how poor balance can be turned into good balance with consistent daily practice. Taking it one element at a time can help. If you use the free ZIBRIO BalanceCoach app, you can take the interactive quiz to help you understand how the Six Pillars fit together, and dig deeper in the Help section link “Surprised by your score?” to find out much more information.
So now that you know your ‘what’ part of your goal, and your ‘why’, as well as an understanding of how your current habits are either supporting or undermining your balance, now we can get to the ‘how’.
Using what you learned in your Six Pillars of Balance, most people find the pillars they have the most control over are exercise (strength, frequency and intensity), and sleep. These pillars can have a massive effect on your balance, so it’s worth thinking about which one would be easiest to make a small change in first.
Exercise
The golden rule here is to stay safe. There are no prizes for pushing too hard and hurting yourself. Please see a doctor or physical therapist for an assessment before trying anything new. The free ZIBRIO BalanceCoach app will take you through our 3-2-1 system for balance, starting with your feet. Whether standing or seated, doing the foot exercises for just 10 minutes a day will start strengthening your sensorimotor system and boosting your balance.
Sleep
Even one night of bad sleep can significantly reduce your balance the following day. So can a hard exercise – that jelly leg feeling is real! If you have trouble sleeping or wake up without feeling refreshed, it’s worth working on your sleep hygiene. Keeping your room cool and dark, staying away from screens for an hour before bed, eating so that you have enough time to digest your food before sleep can help. Getting some sunlight and exercise earlier in the day has also been shown to have a positive effect on sleep.
Conclusion
Now that you’ve taken a fresh look at your balance goals and assessed where you are in relation to them, you can set a fresh goal that works with your emotions, self-belief and your current state of balance health. Remember, it’s never too late to make positive changes to your balance, and you can start today. Progress, not perfection, is your mantra.