But it impacts virtually every movement you make in your daily life. You might not think about your balance often. What are the benefits of having good balance? Let's look at how balance affects your health and some of the best exercises you can try to enhance your stability. The good news is that exercise can improve impaired balance. Still, almost 40% of older adults experience balance problems. It can help you maintain mobility, reduce your risk of falls, and stay active and independent.
In the podcast, she talks about what else you can do once you’ve mastered the one leg stance – like the tandem walk where you practice walking as if you’re going along a tightrope.Proper balance is important at any age, but it's especially critical as you get older. Prof Dawn Skelton has proven that with practice, you could reach a whole minute on one leg with your eyes closed. Do it with some balance exercises, and you get double the benefits. Simply standing up has been shown to have a profound impact on your physical health. If you’re working at home, it is a great way to break up the sedentary day and help correct any postural imbalances that can arise from just sitting.
Working on your balance is also really good for building core strength and body alignment. So it might be time to get working on that balance if you want to keep active well into old age! Those who stood for two seconds or less on the earlier test were three times more likely to have died over the next 13 years than those who managed ten seconds or more. But the one-legged standing test came out on top. When they revisited the people 13 years later, they found performance in all three tests was a predictor of how likely it was a person would die from cancer or a heart attack. They measured grip, counted how often they could stand upright from sitting in a minute, and timed how long the volunteers could stand on one leg with their eyes closed. In 1999, researchers did three simple tests on 2,760 men and women in their 50s. It has been shown that how well you can stand on one leg can be a powerful predictor of how long you will live and how healthy you will be. You spend far more of your life in a one-leg stance than you could imagine – 40% of your walk is spent on one leg, but that’s not the only reason why standing on one leg is more important than you might think. If you keep at it, you’ll find that your balance can improve surprisingly quickly. Sensors in all our joints and muscles keep sending feedback to the brain so it can learn how best to keep you upright. Every time you practise the one leg stance, it is an opportunity to recalibrate your brain, forming new connections and strengthening the coordination between your ears, eyes, joints and muscles. It is the plasticity of our brains that enables us to stay upright beyond our 40s – and gives us the potential to keep improving our balance even if we feel like we’ve succumbed to a life of unavoidable stumbles. Our brain’s balance system has an incredible capacity to compensate by making new nerve connections. But there are still things you can do to overcome this inevitable decline, and it’s all to do with making yourself feel wobbly. Every time you practise the one leg stance, it is an opportunity to recalibrate your brainĪs you get older the balance structures in your inner ear start to deteriorate – the number of hair cells in your inner ear decrease, and even the amount of blood flow you get into your inner ear begins to change.
0 kommentar(er)
