Recently I have had a few of our clients talk about how much they love that we train balance here are Core Principles.
Balance seems to be very important to our clients 50 and older because it is clear that as we age our balance decreases a little. However, that does not mean that we cannot work on it and improve it. Remember age is just a number and it does not define you!
Today I want to explain to you what I feel is the wrong way to train for balance and what is the right way that we use exercises to help work on balance for our clients 50 and better!
Let’s start with what balance exercises are not.
This is pretty simple if anything looks more like a circus act and not an actual exercise you are wasting your time.
You might see a lot of people doing some whacky things like standing on an unstable ball while lifting one leg up and slamming a rope around.
Now, this may look kind of cool but it is very unsafe and frankly stupid because when in life are you ever doing something like that.
How we train balance here are Core Principles
We try to take a practical approach that will help you improve your balance in a way that has carry over to your life.
The best way to challenge your balance is by changing your base of support during certain exercises.
We don’t have specific “balance” exercises here at Core Principles, instead, we use our strength exercises and change the position we are in to challenge some stability.
For example, we can do an exercise like a cable row in many different positions to elicit different responses.
We can start seated on a box so we are nice and stable and are not limited by our balance at all. From there we can move to what is called a half-kneeling position which simply means getting own on one knee. Now that we moved from sitting on a box to kneeling our balanced will be challenge a little more. The next step would be to move to what is called a staggered stance, which simply means standing up with one foot forward and one foot back, focusing on keeping more weight on your front foot. This becomes a little more challenging because we just moved from 3 points of contact with the ground in our half-kneeling position to 2 points of contact in our staggered stance position.
Those were examples of how we can use upper body strength exercises to work on balance.
We can also make sure we are using lower body strength exercises to work on balance also.
We have most people start with squats on both legs and even though we are not specifically challenging balance if you can get your legs super strong your balance will definitely improve.
From there we can work on moving towards more single-leg work with things like step-ups, split squats, and then all the way to single-leg squats.
If you feel that balance is something that you struggle with and are looking to improve it we are here to help. Simply give us a call @ 203-914-6396 or send an email to
infor@coreprinciples-sc.com to chat.
-Coach Pat
