Practice helps...

After flexibility, I think the most neglected portion of fitness training might be balance work.  We notice when we get out of breath and when we can’t schlepp the groceries as easily as we’d like, but we don’t notice balance until we lose it.

The thing is, balance training helps with that whole strength business.  When we improve our balance, we are doing at least two things:  building our proprioception and strengthening our stabilizing muscles.

Proprioception is a fancy word for knowing where our bodies are in space.  When we don’t have much of it, we bump into things (most of us have enough to avoid bumping into things most of the time).  When we have more of it, we can notice that when we squat, our left leg works harder than the right, or that our right shoulder tends to be lower.  This is the first step toward getting better alignment and alignment is what helps us get strong safely.  We build proprioception when we work on balance because we need to keep track of all those (hey, where did we get so many?) arms and legs that suddenly want to wheel around through space instead of helping us stay over our center of gravity.

Which brings me to that second part:  strengthening the stabilizers.  Balance is about finding stability in a precarious world.  We use the muscles closest to the center of our bodies to stabilize ourselves.  Putting ourselves in (controlled) unstable environments helps us practice stabilizing for those times when we are not in control of how unstable the environment is.  We adapt to what we practice.  Strong stabilizers free up our more peripheral muscles to move us around and lift heavy stuff.

What to do?  Practice standing on one foot.  Use dumbbells instead of barbells.  Work asymmetrically.  Use the BOSU or any of the many kinds of wobbly surfaces available.  Do some yoga or Pilates.

We can’t make the world more stable, so we have to learn to adapt!