Balance and Coordination Exercises to Improve Your Balance in 5 Minutes
The best time to work on improving your balance is in your 30s and 40s. The next best time is in your 50s and up!
When we are young and active, we are training and retraining our balance daily with sports, recreational activities and play. These activities are the early training ground for balance.
As we age, we become more sedentary and less physically active. Our increase in a sedentary lifestyle causes a deterioration of the brain and body’s abilities.
Balance is a “brain coordination activity.”
it needs constant stimulation.
Balance is the ability to maintain the body’s centre of mass over its base of support. This intricate balance system allows humans to make automatic body corrections to maintain posture and stability in various conditions and activities.
Balance is usually involved when an individual is moving from one foot to the other and in various directions.
If you’re not actively using the balance muscles in your body and your brain, your balance and coordination skills will get worse over time.
Yes. Too much sitting can cause you to lose your balance.
Now, you’ve most likely lost your balance before. Probably lots of times as a kid that may have led to falling down, and a few times when you were younger where you were able to correct the situation before falling.
Balance is achieved and maintained by a complex set of sensorimotor control systems with input from vision (sight), proprioception (touch), and the vestibular system in the brain (motion, equilibrium, spatial orientation). The brain takes all this information and integrates it to perform a reaction to that input; and motor output to the eyes and body muscles.
Balance is one of the most important functions if you want to keep moving!
Balance training improves mobility, stabilizes joints, and optimizes balance to hopefully prevent falls and injury (fractures are the worst) because your balance system is ready to correct the situation and “catch yourself”.
Balance needs input from the sensory system in your muscles and joints, eyes, and your vestibular system to work properly and be trained. Therefore, physically active pursuits and specific balance training exercises are necessary to keep this system functioning properly.
The reason you can practise balance to become more responsive is that an organ at the back of your skull, the cerebellum, and the cortex of your brain “learns” from this informational input and creates memories and “instinctual reactions” to certain situations.
Balance training not only keeps the brain and sensory components interactive, but your muscles and joints will also benefit.
Balance training can be performed one exercise at a time, all day long as you perform your daily activities (stealth exercising).
In the early days of doing balance training, be sure to use something stable to steady yourself. As you progress, you can instead add challenges to create an unstable surface to further strengthen your balance.
As always, be sure to consult your doctor or other healthcare professionals when starting any new physical activity.
Watch the video below to learn balance and coordination exercises* to improve your balance in 5 minutes.
Exercises* performed in the video include:
1. Walking Slowly with High Knees (can be performed eyes closed)
2. Walking Slowly with High Knees and Raising Arms Forward and Down (can be performed eyes closed)
3. Walking Slowly with High Knees and Raising Arms Sideways and Down (can be performed eyes closed)
4. Sitting and Standing repeatedly, no arms.
5. Standing and Balancing on Both Legs, eyes closed.
6. Lift One Leg Off Floor and Hold (can be performed with eyes closed)
7. Walking Imaginary Tightrope
8. Lift One Leg Off Floor, Straighten It, Then Swing It in All Directions and Circling at the Hip
9. Side To Side Stepping
10. Golfer's Pickup
*Please consult your chiropractor, doctor, or other healthcare professional to make sure these exercises are safe for you to do.