A common goal that people have is that they want to improve their balance.

And so often many will try to get better at balancing by, well, just balancing.

This is why you will often see squats being performed on a bosu ball (see the picture below), crunches on a swiss ball, various un-supported cable machine or balance board exercises.

It is claimed that these exercises work your “stabilizing muscles” and therefore promote improved balance whilst working on the muscles the exercise is primarily targeting, like the abdominals, with the Swiss ball crunch example.

There are a few issues with this, and I will first explain by discussing an analogy.

Let’s say you want to get better at football (soccer)

It is true that to get better at a sport you need to play the sport but if you want to get really good you can’t “just do it”.

It is true that when you play a sport, or any skill, for the first time, you always make some initial progress. That is called motor learning.

But if you keep just playing the sport, after a short while, you won’t improve very fast at all and will plateau very quickly.

You will keep making the same mistakes and most importantly you won’t spend enough time on the mistakes or weaknesses to quickly evolve.

It is like trying to learn how to drive by practising only once a month.

This is why sports teams have training sessions and practise specific drills to work on their weaknesses over and over again.

And so, if you are trying to improve at football, you need to break the skill down into its fundamental parts.

For an outfield player this would be shooting, passing, heading, crossing, running off the ball, reading the game, passing under pressure, communication, etc.

You then need to assess how good you are at these individual elements and identify your weaknesses.

One way of doing that is to watch yourself on video tape or ask your peers to assess your abilities objectively.

Once your deficiencies have been identified, you then need to practise those weaknesses relentlessly.

The key to improving is rapid repetition of the most fundamental elements that need improving.

You need to put in the “reps” with the highest frequency possible and for it to be challenging enough to stimulate growth or improvement.

Just like working on the engine of a car to make it go faster looks nothing like driving it; improving at a sport can look nothing like actually playing it.

For example, you might identify that you are very weak playing with your right foot and so you might spend an hour passing and shooting against a wall with your right foot or juggling a ball with just your weak side.

If you try to use your right foot in a competitive game, you will most likely lose possession very quickly and you won’t have an opportunity to work on your weakness enough.

If all you care about is “just playing the sport” then that is fine. But if you want to get better and better, it is not.

Improving your ability to stand on one leg for longer is another form of a sport because it is all about how long you are trying to stand on one leg.

This is the hallmark of a sport…if you stand on one leg for the longest, you are the winner!

And so, to get better at balancing you need to break it down into its individual parts.

Fortunately balancing on one leg involves fewer fundamental parts than the football analogy.

Balancing primarily involves, proprioception (body awareness) and individual muscle strength.

In order to stand on one leg, you need to keep your centre of mass over your standing foot. This involves awareness of where your body is in space.

When you lift one leg up your peroneal muscles (the muscles on the outside of your lower leg) and hip abductors (muscles on the side of the hip), on the standing foot side, have to work extra hard to stop you from falling to the side of the lifted leg.

Therefore, in order to improve your ability to stand on one leg for longer, you need to strengthen these muscle groups individually.

If you try to strengthen them all at once, by balancing, the weak links will not be exposed sufficiently. The strong muscles will take over and the weak ones (which maybe your body isn’t very good at contracting) will not contribute adequately.

In addition, it is almost impossible to fully optimize individual groups of muscles with an exercise that involves balance and lacks support to contract against. This is just a law of physics.

It is like trying to shoot a cannon from a canoe

You need to challenge each muscle throughout its range of motion giving it as much focus as possible.

You need to expose localized muscle groups to progressively larger forces. The more force a muscle can withstand, the stronger it will become.

So, you might be wondering, how do I train these muscles individually?

It requires some simple targeted foot exercises, sitting down, not standing up!

Here are a few examples:

They may not be the most exciting exercises, but they can be hugely beneficial not only for your balance but also for ankle strength, injury prevention and reducing compensation patterns in the knee and hips.

That is all for now.

Remember to BE Your Best You every day!

John

How to get really good at balancing without balancing