Five great ways to improve your balance with yoga
Students often tell me they notice their balance has improved after coming to my classes regularly. I ‘d say that’s because we are working on our balance in more ways than you might think in yoga. It’s not just the balancing poses.
What is good balance?
Balance is the ability to ‘right yourself’, to come back to or hold a midline or centre of stability in your body, in a variety of positions. Balance can be something you take for granted, until you notice you are less sure of yourself after an injury, or after spending more hours sedentary, when your eyesight changes, and of course as you age. Once this happens, you can really appreciate how your sense of steadiness and stability affects your overall movement ability and confidence. It also affects how easeful you feel in your body, because poor balance creates physical tension.
Balance poses are challenging. It can be so frustrating as you fall in and out of the pose…there is no hiding in a standing balance!
If you find this, note that it becomes interesting and fun when you understand that you need to deliberately create opportunities to wobble around. You need to feel yourself moving towards and away from a centred position, in order to challenge and strengthen your balance systems. So in class, we create off-balance dynamic movements, wobble around on a regular basis, and then the static yoga balance poses get miraculously easier too.
How does balance work in humans?
Our ability to balance comes largely from three integrating systems :
1) the visual system
2) the vestibular system (the inner ear)
3) proprioception - your ability to sense where your limbs and your whole body are in space and in relation to each other.
The visual and vestibular systems work together to orient us to the space around us, to find upright, level to the horizon, as we transition and move in different directions - turning to the side, moving upwards or down and any combination. Proprioception is your unconscious awareness of where your body is in space, gained from feedback from neuroreceptors in all your joints and tissues, which via the feedback of movement, send constant quickfire messages up to your brain, for your motor control system to respond to and send messages back to the muscles to create movement.
What are some of the most effective ways in yoga to actively challenge these three integrated systems?
1) Mobilise and strengthen your feet and ankles for better balance
As our feet and ankles are home to about a THIRD of all our proprioception mechanoreceptors, clearly, how well your feet and ankles move is a foundation of good balance. As your feet are the only part of your whole body in contact with the ground when you are upright and moving, they are a crucial feedback system! The strength of the muscles of the foot is also the base of our stability via the chain of connected muscular engagement right up the pelvic floor, and into the trunk or core muscles.
Yet, as a result of wearing shoes, a lot of us have drastically limited ability to feel and control the movement of our feet. If you come my classes, you already know ALL about this, but regularly exercising all the joints of your toes, feet and ankles is a crucial part of improving and maintaining good balance. My blog on the feet has all the exercises you need to develop stronger and more pliable feet.
2) Strong Hips Help You Balance
To stay steady and stable as we move around, we need strong hips to support the chain of joint movements from the foot all the way up to the pelvis. We need strength in all the ways the hips move, when the leg moves forward (hip flexion), leg behind the body (hip extension), and supportive lateral hip strength or muscles at the outside /side of our hips.
One of the best ways to strengthen hips and improve balance together is to do single leg movements, challenging one side, i.e. one foot-ankle-knee-hip chain of connection, to increase its usual work and weight bearing load. (Also known as wobbling around practice!)
Here are some things to try.
Stand on one leg, bend forward, touch your hands to a chair or the floor and return back up to standing upright, (re-righting yourself), try with a bend knee and then with your leg as straight as possible.
Transition from a lunge to standing on one leg, hug your knee standing tall and then smoothly make your way back to lunge again. These two exercises integrate a level change (moving your head up and down) which works your vestibular system and visual system.
Try a slow motion curtsey and then bring the moving leg forward and tap the toes on the floor in front of you, you can add bringing that knee up in front of you. Keep going for a minute, noticing the work in your standing leg, the connection from foot right up to hip, and getting used to the feeling of your body moving away from and back towards your standing upright centre.
Here is a short single leg practice:
3) Specific core work feeds into the stabilizing needed for balance
Part of finding stability from off balance comes from the whole trunk (core muscles) responsively firming. Practicing specific core activation movement to feel this shift from relaxed, to the whole trunk firming, can help with adapting well in potentially off balance positions. Responsive stability from our centre allows other areas of the body (like the neck and shoulders) to stay relatively relaxed. Try the moves in this core strength blog post.
4) Add dynamic movement as well as statically holding yoga balance poses
Notice how it’s much easier to maintain balance when you look at one fixed point, allowing your visual and vestibular system to create a steady orientation. Even in a non balance pose like a high lunge, notice the difference in body sway by first looking forward and then slowly looking up and holding your gaze there. If you are standing holding one knee or big toe, try slowly turning your head to the side. Moving your head and gaze point around in poses is an easy way to add challenge to the three balance systems.
In standing balance poses, as well as holding them, you can also practice moving in and out of the poses dynamically and combining poses. This can be harder in some ways than holding still in a single leg balance pose. Dynamic balance moves are effective training for holding static balance poses. At the same time we are also strengthening our trunk (core) stability and whole body coordination.
5) Exercise your balance systems – by closing your eyes
Take away your vision, and your proprioception has to work much harder to keep you balanced. Proprioceptive training! Do this regularly and watch your balance confidence improve.
Try this simple test:
Walk slowly with small steps along the edge of your yoga mat or a rug. Once you reach the end, turn around and walk the other way (with the other foot half on /off), one foot is half on and half off the edge of the rug/mat. Leave some space between each slow deliberate foot placement. Notice how your balance feels. You will be using your visual system and proprioceptive info from your feet and ankles in particular. You might feel them wobbling around, even though you are on solid ground just walking!
If you were looking down, repeat the walk, this time looking straight ahead, and if you were looking ahead go again while turning your head side to side once or twice as you step slowly. Now you are challenging your visual and vestibular systems to work a bit harder! Increased wobbling.
Repeat a third time with your eyes closed. Notice how that feels. Unsettling? Much more wobbly? Stop and open your eyes if you need to, otherwise notice how really focussing and sensing into your feet as your base of contact can start to steady you more with your eyes closed. Increased proprioception! Our visual system is powerful ,so we can improve balance by taking vision away and working our proprioception more.
Give it a try here:
Bonus Tip - Bring Balance into Your Daily Life
One of the best things about balance practice is that it’s easy to blend into everyday life to increase your confidence, without it feeling like much extra effort. What can you use in your daily environment?
Some single leg heel raises when you go up the stairs or on a step? I know there will be some single leg teeth brushers out there! The kitchen top is ideal to hover your hand over while practising some single leg eyes closed balancing.
I add a bit of playfulness on my daily walk, looking for opportunities to balance, just as kids naturally do.
This kind of stuff isn't trivial, it all adds up and can bring more movement variety into your life, supporting you to move and feel well. It moves us away from ‘exercise’ being another ‘to do’ or chore and makes it more part of our day. I love that!
Balance poses are a fun and important part of improving strength, coordination, and confidence in movement, with pretty quick changes possible. – not to mention protecting your long term future health by decreasing your risk of falls.
If you come to my classes you will have done a huge range of balancing joy. Do you feel your balance confidence and ability has changed from doing these kinds of practices? And I’m interested to learn about how you find ways of adding balance in your daily life. Let me know in the comments!
