How to Move with Grace, Balance, and Control

Learn how to move, climb, run, dance, and fall with grace.

Start Out Being Aligned

This is where movement, balance and control begin. Doing any exercise, any movement, even just stepping off a curb, or walking down the driveway can be harmful when you are out of alignment. This is fact, not opinion. Make sure you do no harm to yourself. Self-preservation should be everyone’s number one priority.

Check your alignment by standing in front of a mirror in a pair of shorts. What do you see?

  • Is your head forward?
  • Are your shoulders and upper back rounded?
  • Do your shoulder blades flare out?
  • Is your hip up or out to the side?
  • Are your knees turned in?
  • Are your feet turned out?

Ask a friend to take a set of four standing pictures. Take a look at them and see what you think.

If you don’t see anything alarming, count yourself lucky. But take a minute and double-check. Back yourself up against a wall. Put your heels against the wall and see what else goes easily to the wall.

Your butt should be on the wall, equal pressure on the left and the right. Both shoulder blades should be on the wall. Your head should be on the wall, your chin level with the floor. If everything is in line, standing straight against the wall should be easy. However, if you are not comfortable standing here for a few minutes, that’s an indication that something is not in line. Go see the team at BodyFix Method™. They will get you back into alignment and moving with ease. 

Worried About Your Balance?

Your body’s stability is maintained by your autonomic nervous system, which also maintains your breathing, a vital system that you rarely think about. As long as we are centered along a vertical axis, we can move, climb, run, dance, and fall with grace. There’s a feeling that our balance system declines with age, but growing older doesn’t mean we have to fall or worry about our balance. Stay aligned and we have little to fear.

Proprioception is the sense of our body’s position in space, a 24/7 gyroscope that helps us balance and move with ease. When your body is in line, the nervous system works and can recognize changes in your world of surfaces, whether it is ice on the sidewalk, a higher than expected curb, or a tricycle out of place.

Much of our response to unsuspected changes in surfaces is a reflex action. Muscles respond reflexively to maintain balance and our upright posture. If the muscles don’t work on reflex, then we can fall, as the brain takes too long to process the information. Quick reflexes serve us better and faster.

Want better balance? Build and reinforce your reflex responses. Make as many basic actions as possible reflex movements: walking, climbing, running, dancing, even falling. Make them pure reflex. Wait for the brain to work through what’s going on and you’ll be picking yourself up off the floor. Reflexes are faster and they are easily learned. A reflex is a habit. Just learn good ones.

Balance training can improve the function of individuals with chronic ankle pain or instability. If you have knee osteoarthritis, or have suffered a meniscus tear, chances are that your balance is worse than someone who hasn’t had these issues. Balance is worse in knee patients with an ACL or hip injury. Injuries do bring on more injuries. The good news is that you can take a few simple steps to stop that cycle.

If your reflexes are slow, then falls or a close call will happen far too often. Build and reinforce your reflex responses. If you hit an uneven piece of sidewalk or if the stair tread is loose, a reflex response will catch you and all will be good. The trauma of a fall or of suddenly jolted and overworked limbs won’t be your fate. If you strengthen your reflex response with simple balance exercises, daily activities will become easier, more graceful, and safer.

 

What Do I Have To Do?

The balance training you and I need requires little space and almost no equipment. You can combine balance training with strength, endurance, cardio, and flexibility exercises. You can do balance training at a gym or at home. Balance training has helped athletes with hip injuries and ankle sprains, children with vestibular (inner ear) problems, chronic knee injuries, elderly individuals with ataxia (frequent falls), and even lower back pain for young and old alike.

Balance board training is a very efficient tool in rehabilitation because it actually produces greater leg and thigh muscle strength gains than a series of gym based weight machine exercises, which take far longer. Balance sandal training (V. Janda programs) has been shown to increase isolation and speed of key hip and buttock muscles.

A program of alignment therapy exercises, an approach used by the therapists at BodyFix Method™, improves stability in older adults. A longer-term program of Tai Chi also improves balance abilities of older adults. That improvement will persist after the training stops. That’s impressive! It also improves the balance of younger people, but most young people don’t think that they will ever need it!

Balance Training – Steps to Take

Let’s begin with a few easy steps:

Balance training begins with your feet. Pay careful attention to your arches. You need to be able to form a good arch in your foot without bending your toes. Flat feet don’t help with balance. Flat feet can’t respond quickly to changes in conditions; there’s no reflex reponse with flat feet.

  • It can be challenging to learn how to form an arch. A simple trick is to soften your knees and then turn your knees out without moving your feet. This will lift the arch up automatically. Hold this position for 30 seconds. Rest and repeat.
  • Another option is to grip and release the floor with your forefoot (toes) to activate the deep intrinsic arch muscles. We call this exercise Toe Scrunches. It can be done standing (harder) or seated (easier) and it will build strong feet and arches. A few minutes a day doing Toe Scrunches will wake up your feet, support an arch, and build overall balance and stability.

Once you have learned how to make a decent arch, then you can try a few balance exercises.

Proceed from sitting to standing and from unstable to stable surfaces. Hold the arch throughout the exercises.

  • An excellent beginning balance exercise is simply to stand on one leg in a doorway for 30 seconds. Then do it with your eyes closed. Try it twice a day, three or four times at each setting. It will get easier. This is called Tree Pose and is a staple of a yoga practice. (Alej, can we refer to Elaine’s blog here?)
  • You can then add various leaning movements while you are standing. A single step taken forward with a forward lean becomes a lunge. Holding it emphasizes alignment, balance, and control. Try a single backward or side step. Do these slowly six to twelve times, once per day. A favorite exercise of mine is Walking Backward. Find a clear space, clasp your hands behind your back (easier) or your head (harder), and take a step backward, followed by another and so on for the length of the room. Build up to 1-2 minutes walking backward. This exercise will reset the thigh bones in the hip socket and work muscles that you don’t usually use in walking.

Balance is as important as strength or flexibility to overall physical fitness. Most injuries occur suddenly when an unexpected force is encountered, such as when an ankle is sprained by an uneven sidewalk or and unseen curb or step. Balance is even more important than strength in preventing an injury.

If you would like some professional help, please fill out the Contact form below this article. We will get back to you with a point of view and some suggested exercises to improve your balance, posture, and alignment. We would love for you to come in for an Evaluation and to build a balance program to improve your balance, posture, and alignment.

William M. Boland