Balance is a skill…do you know how?
Yesterday I climbed over silver-coloured rolling beach rocks, balanced on split log paths and crept over large shards of shale laying barrier between the moist, spruce-perfumed air of Gaff Point and the glistening, golden late afternoon waters of the North Atlantic Ocean. There wasn’t a moment on the hike when my balance wasn’t being challenged by the footing.
I didn’t always have good balance and in years gone by, yoga poses where we stood on one leg and attempted to mimic a stone god, eluded me. I used to tell myself I just didn’t have good balance.
But a funny thing happened. As I started to watch the hands of time move more quickly I became curious about what I could do to develop better balance. I quickly learned that balance is a skill and if practiced can be restored, enhanced and maintained throughout life.
I learned that standing on one leg like a concrete pillar was not a useful way of doing it. Practicing tree pose is good for doing tree pose but has little functional application for daily living.
One of the comments I get from the women in my “Timeless Body” online membership, is how the effects of the practice creep up on them until they find themselves noticing themselves in a different way.
Mahone Bay Quilting expert Val Hearder says:
“I walk down my steep old stairs with confidence. My stride has grown longer, I can keep up with my husband and we’ve started doubling the distance of our walks.
A year ago I was a little concerned as one of my feet wouldn’t lift quite high enough while walking and it was catching on the stairs or even the floor. It was just enough for me to notice and be concerned. I realize that has cleared up completely.”
When you consider that fifty percent of chronic conditions that affect quality of life in people over fifty are due to neuromuscular degeneration, the efforts of movement educators whether they work with people on a yoga mat or in a gym needs to embrace and integrate a more somatic or sensory approach to exercise.
Waking up how the brain perceives movement is a fundamental key to improving movement and creating neuroplasticity, ( yes you can change at any age) in the brain.. And as much as we’ve been told we need to stem the wastage of muscle tissue over time, something called “sarcopenia”, it is just as, or more important that we can efficiently use the muscle and nervous system tissue we have to create coordinated functional movements.
While doing a bicep curl may help you tone that muscle, learning to coordinate the arm and shoulder in daily movements like reaching overhead to get your cereal out of the cupboard, may serve you better as you age.
For example, to train the hand-arm-shoulder -spine connection we would break down the movements of the joints of the wrist, the elbow and the shoulder, use balls to create stimulation of the muscles and then learn to activate the muscles and integrate them into full body movements.
Training our proprioceptive system… that is how we feel or sense ourselves moving, is an important component for neuromuscular health. Too often we have been trained in this culture to sit still, be quiet and override our own internal messages about our needs. What makes us useful and compliant members of society often makes us a menace to ourselves.
Training proprioception through the sole of the foot and the palm of the hand helps to integrate the limbs, not only into our brain maps thereby improving neuromuscular activation, but it also teaches how tensioning through the legs and arms are a key component to creating core activation and support.
In Timeless Body classes we use balls to stimulate the sole of the foot and then use pieces of stretchy elastic to activate the muscles around the ankle which are key for balance and a healthy gait ( how we walk). Many of my members, myself included, sprained ankles when younger and were never functionally retrained. Many of the knee, hip and spine issues that come into my studio can be cleared up with consistent ankle stability training.
How well you walk, and how fast is one of the best benchmarks of ageing. In my view, every exercise we do on the mat or in the studio should have a profound and cumulative effect on how we walk.
It is the grand design of our nervous system. All those milestones parents mark as a child goes from birth to standing are in fact the very movements we need to retrain and retain in order to age well.
In my classes, we improve our balance through sensory-rich exercise, multidimensional fascial movements, self-massage and functional strength training. If you want to join us you can sign up for my newsletter here and I’ll send you some key exercises you can do ahead of time to get ready.
Hope to see you on the mat!
If you want to see this work in action make sure you sign up for my newsletter (below), and check out all my courses and free materials at my online studio, and find something that will work for you.