Often in the media we are presented with articles on aging and exercise. It is not unusual to see a headline touting the one most important exercise that you should do to stay strong, stay healthy, prevent falling etc. Often that one exercise is quite easy. These exercises tend not to mimic our typical activities in life or push us to a degree that will instill a change or prevent decline. I wish it were as easy as one exercise! While I think it is great to see articles on the importance of exercise as we age, I do feel it is a disservice to present primarily exercises that do not challenge or push us enough.
A recent example of this was a post I saw claiming that the one thing you should do daily to prevent falls is to practice balancing on one leg. While this is not an inappropriate exercise in and of itself, it does not challenge the many facets of fall prevention. Balance is defined as the ability to keep or put something in a steady position so that it does not fall. It is important to be able to do this, but preventing a fall often has to do with the ability to recover from a loss of balance; to catch yourself.
We have several systems in our body that work together to help us stay steady and upright. These systems include the:
- musculoskeletal system – our muscles and bones
- visual system – our eyes
- proprioceptive system – our skin and joints-The sense that lets us perceive the location, movement, and actions of parts of the body.
- vestibular system – our inner ear, and our vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) – an involuntary reflex that coordinates eye movements with head movements to maintain visual stability during motion.
As you can see, training your balance involves many aspects. Therefore, to work on our balance and our ability to restore a loss of balance we need to work on:
- strength training
- endurance training
- reaction training- such as catching a ball, kicking a ball, practicing losing your balance and recovering from it
- agility training- quick movements on your feet
- vestibular training- practice different tasks with eyes open, eyes closed, looking right/left/up and down
- surface training- practice skills on different surfaces, with and without shoes
- dual task training- falls often occur when we are not paying attention to what we are doing. For example, when involved in a conversation or thinking about something. Try practicing balance drills and other exercises while counting backwards from 100 by 3’s, reciting what you ate yesterday, naming all the animals you can think of that begin with the letter A, etc.
Regrettably, preventing falls can’t be trained by training one skill.
If you are concerned about your balance, talk to your trainer about incorporating more balance type and multifaceted activities into your workouts. My guess is that they are already doing that!
Thanks to Amira Ranney, PT for writing this article for our newsletter.
Amira Ranney, PT, MS