It’s possible that the way many of us conceive of “balance” isn’t really very helpful. Here are some simple ways to improve your balance, along with a re-frame to help you along the way.

Hey friends, welcome to a video instead of a blog post this month!

Transcript

Here’s the experiment: rather than writing about, it I thought it would be easier to show you all of the thoughts that I would like to share on the topic of balance. I think it would be fair to say that we have largely misunderstood balance because what happens often is when people are thinking balance, they are thinking something along the lines of “ta-da” (balances on one foot)…. And I’ve hit a balance point.

Let’s Talk Balance

However, in the places where people are saying things like, oh, my balance is terrible, for example, in exercises like a Single-leg Deadlift where there’s a bit of a wobble–and then a return to standing–or like in a Split Squat, navigating the up-and-down without feeling unsteady, where the key thing is, I think it is probably safe to assume that under most circumstances, what people are looking for when they say they want their balance to better, is that they don’t want to feel like they are at risk of falling.

Understandably, we don’t want the risk of falling. Sometimes there’s this popular idea like, oh well, work on my balance while I’m brushing my teeth, stand here like this, and balance. And the thing is that there’s perhaps, let’s say we have a static balance and a dynamic form of balance. Where a static balance is concerned, that’s one of these things where we go like this and if your goal is to have a really amazing tree pose in yoga or to somehow otherwise attain feats of standing on one leg then the static balance and the practicing balance while you brush your teeth, for example, can be a good way to go.

On the other hand, what we’re talking about mostly when we do things like the single leg deadlift, if you wobble and then you come back to standing, then what you have achieved is a form of dynamic balance because the goal has been achieved. Your body found a way to right itself so that you don’t fall.

So that’s an easy start to this, we have to, we have our differentiation between static balance and dynamic balance.

There is a next level piece to this where, I think the thing is, what people are looking for often is like that, but I don’t want to be wobbling, I would rather feel steady. To that end, there are a variety of factors that can influence balance for a person, and the thing that I’m going to talk about today are controllable elements of this dynamic balance situation.

And at the risk of really oversimplifying, the more grounded that you can feel, the more you can feel a connection to the ground through your feet and then also perhaps settle into that–we have this soft knees kind of situation. The more grounded you can feel, the more steady and the more balanced you can feel.

So the first thing here for us to give some thought to is the idea of your connection with the floor or your foot’s connection with the floor.

First then…I invite you, come on journey with me!

First consider just standing, this idea of feeling grounded, right? So we have your connection with the floor, so you can imagine, if you will, feeling your heel, and what we can do is from the heel, you can play around, roll your feet out, feel the outside edge of your heel, and then roll your feet in, feel the inside edge of your heel and roll back and forth just so we can feel the outside edge, inside edge.

And then the idea is we want to see if we can find a spot where you can feel a little bit of both. So kind of like a nice in-between spot for your heel.

And then we can also, from the front of your feet, think inside edge, so like big toes pressing into the floor. It might feel a little bit like you’re collapsing your arches as you do this. And you could roll to the outside edge, we have outside edge, inside edge. And what’s interesting is this is the same idea with the heel, but if we can find, oftentimes if at rest, a popular one is outside edges of the feet. So in that case, it’s useful for us to re-find the inside edges of the feet.

As you’re trying to re-find the inside edges of your feet, you may also arrive at a place where as you’re going back and forth, you may find a place where the in-between can be kind of like if you’re big toe, the ball of your big toe and your big toe, press into the floor kind of actively. So we’ve got outside heel, inside heel, ball of big toe and big toe. And then ideally you’ll notice that out by your pinky that part of your foot is also connected with the floor and then once you’ve done that now I’m talking through this quickly feel free to take your time.

Once you’ve done that we can go exhale settle soften your knees a little bit and as you soften your knees so as you soften your knees your hips may also soften so there will be a hint of sitting back as well. So, a little bit of sitting back through your butt and your hips. This is that connection with the floor feeling.

From here, you can play around if you like with the idea of breathing in and then exhaling and letting everything kind of settle down into your feet. Breath in. I will just for the same sake of giving credit, where credit is due, this settling into the ground is an exercise I learned from Tai Chi. And it plays a role in other forms of martial arts as well.

But part one–first thing that I wanted to share here was this idea of this grounding exercise, so that you can get a sense for not only the idea that your feet are pressing into the floor and feeling that connection but also settling into that connection because it would be very possible for me to notice my feet and then be very upright and tall and that can make balance tricky as well. So we have this settling sensation.

Using the split squat from our current training phase as an example, we could also, since we often will set up, I don’t have a pad down here, pretend I have pads under my knees. We can also, from the setup position–and you can do this either at the bottom of your split squat or if you’re up here at the top, you can do it here–the key thing is finding a way to settle into that front foot.

So same idea, inside edge of the heel, outside edge, big toe, ball of big toe, so you can feel like you have maybe kind of an active arch and the weight is down through the arch of your foot. Some part of that may involve slightly, slightly shifting your weight forward into that front leg. Now I still have a bit of a 60/40 weight distribution here, maybe even 70/30.

But if we can find that front foot connection, going down is easy just as you’re going down, There we go, feel that connection on the way up, push down through that connection, keep pushing down, and the thing is what often happens is we come to the top and then come up out of it. And you can see I’ve lost my foot here. So if we can come up and maintain that connection, when you feel like you’re beginning to lose that connection, shifting back and out of away from it, just kind of stop there, find that connection. And if we can keep that connection all the way up and all the way down… Bonus thing: notice that I’m not on a tight rope here…

Sometimes if you accidentally put yourself on a tight rope, that can make it trickier. But if we can use this, then we have this nice connection and we have this nice opportunity for your body to get a sense for your control because through your foot your body is controlling itself up and controlling itself down. I realized that split squats are not necessarily easy enough always to feel like yes I’m in total control but at the same time through that muscular effort your connection with the ground is the key to you feeling stable.

I wanted to add a bonus thought here:

You’ll notice that I brought my complementary balance aid here, and I even used it moments ago when coming up out of position. A thing, so if I were to doing this exercise and I had a weight here in this hand, an advantage here, let me take a step back. I think also, for better or for worse, this idea–and I’m going to blame this on one of the many toxic elements of fitness culture and also just things that run rampant in our culture–it gets ingrained in our minds somehow, unconsciously, that if I’m doing this exercise here with a weight that’s challenging, and I’m using this foam roller for, and I’m using this foam roller, somehow it’s gotten into our minds that that would be a form of cheating, that that’s short circuiting the balance training.

So brief nerdy bit, there’s certainly room for, out there in the world, you’ve probably seen like the upside down half blue ball, the BOSU, or various unstable like standing on pads or wobble boards. There’s a time in a place for balance-specific training. It’s just that most of the time, the overwhelming majority of the time, in balance-training, you don’t have a weight in your hand. Because we are either training for balance or we’re training for strength…most of the time.

In the case here if I’m doing a split squat that is challenging and having the foam roller here which provides my nervous system with just an additional bit of context so that I can and an additional piece of stability so that I can focus more on doing the work in question. chances are, because remember, this foot connection is our key, as long as I maintain that foot connection and a sense of being grounded into it, then it becomes much easier for me to maintain balance and through movement. Having this here, if I add a weight to this, having this here as a piece of additional context for your nervous system, to make sense of this weight, this hip, this foot, doing the work, this provides your nervous system with just an additional piece of information to help manage stability.

And the thing is, like, you can do that, if you can be grounded into your foot, work this weight, get stronger through this motion, the combination of getting stronger through the motion while staying grounded through the foot will make your balance better anyway, your dynamic balance outside and in this case this form of static balance will get better.

So, one, I wanted to share a couple of exercises or ways that you can do things you can do that we don’t normally make time for in the gym such as getting a feel for being grounded through your foot and then additional context for you so when you’re setting up exercises now you can be thinking in terms of anchoring into your feet for those.

Two, things you know just feeling that contact into your foot and then bringing that sense of the contact into the ground into tough balance exercises will be tremendously helpful and my bonus thought for you, number three, is that the complementary balance aid is actually quite a helpful piece of the puzzle and is by no means cheating. In fact, you may see coming in the future–I’m saying this as if only Reimagym members are watching…which may be true, maybe it’s not, but– here at Reimagym, a thing I can say you’ll probably see in the future, is more use of the supposedly “cheating” complementary balance aid that we like to call it.

Those are my thoughts. Thanks for listening to me ramble, if you’ve made it this far in the video, wow, you’re great! Thanks for watching!