What's the Best Exercise for Balance?
What type of balance training is best for older adults? How can you decide on the best exercises to improve your balance?
Balance is personal. Each person’s strengths and weaknesses are personalized to them, so there’s no single exercise that is perfect for everyone. However, there are a few secrets to being able to improve your balance no matter how good or bad it might be at the moment.
Remember balance is essentially a communication system between information that comes in through your senses, how your brain interprets these signals, then sends neuro muscular impulses that tell your muscles where and how much to move.
Strength vs Sensory Training
Muscle strength is an important part of your ability to balance. Without muscles, your skeleton would not be able to move or even stand. Unless you’re lying down, your muscles are constantly working to stabilize your skeleton. Naturally, they work more when you’re standing and moving around than when you’re seated.
But strength isn’t necessarily the best place to start if you want to improve your balance. Remember the communication system – you need to boost the signals coming in first.
One of the best places to start your balance training is with your feet. We spend most of our time either seated, or wearing shoes that dampen the signals coming in from our feet. But by training our feet, we can actually boost the quality of the signals coming through from our feet, even when wearing shoes. It’s a simple and highly effective way to improve your balance.
Balance training exercises are all about conscious control, you’re reinforcing the neural pathways from the senses to the brain, and back to the muscles. The best way to do this is very deliberately and carefully, thinking about what you want your muscles to do and paying attention to the feeling you get back from the soles of your feet.
Try this
image from ZIBRIO BalanceCoach Better Balance® Training ‘Feet’
Stand barefoot (hold onto something sturdy like a counter top if you need to)
Spread your toes as wide apart as you can.
Try to press your weight into the floor evenly across your whole foot – the same pressure on big toe, little toe, ball of the foot and heel.
Hold for 30 seconds
For anyone who has had any kind of injury, or joint replacement in the hip, knee or ankle, these exercises are especially important as the neural pathways are often damaged by the surgery.
Where to Find the Best Balance Exercises
You can access some simple exercises for the feet in ZIBRIO’s Better Balance® Training, available within the FREE BalanceCoach app. There are 3 exercise sessions to try free, or you can upgrade to a subscription to access the full value of these and other exercises that work all parts of your sensory-motor system.
You can also work with a personal trainer, or Balance Specialist. Search for a ZIBRIO trained balance specialist near you here (simply zoom into the area of the country where you are to see if there’s one near you). Many Balance Specialists offer virtual classes as well as in person training.