Aging Gracefully: Importance of Balancing on One Leg

Why is cultivating one legged balance important as we age? The number one reason to work on this type of balance is to prevent falls and potential injury which will keep us out of our lives. Preventing falling is not just important for elderly adults, but is important for everyone. Falls can lead to injury and sometimes broken bones; if we want to stay active and engaged in our life as we age, we need to avoid falls. Cultivating balance won't 100% guarantee that we will never fall, but it improves our chances.

What is Balance?

Balance is our ability to adapt to instability and unevenness in order to remain upright. We adapt to uneven surfaces under our feet, to changes in heights when taking stairs, to small shifts of weight within our bodies as we move. The better our adaptability to these changes, the easier it is for us to remain upright as we move through the world. Balance is supported by vision, strength, flexibility, and calm. Here's how:

Vision: Seeing what is in front of us helps our balance tremendously. If you stand on one leg and close your eyes, you will experience how important vision is for balance; it is possible to balance with your eyes closed, but it is significantly more challenging. In yoga our Gaze is called Drishti, which is our optical focus. Focusing the eyes on one place helps anchor our ability to balance. When you move your eyes around while standing on one leg, it makes it harder to balance. When our focus shifts, it affects our proprioception. When we keep our eyes still, it helps create better stillness in the rest of the body. Yoga poses, like Tree pose and Half Moon help us cultivate our standing balance. Moving from one pose to another may require changing the Drishti to a new location which can increase the challenge in balancing. 








Strength: Strength supports our stability while we balance. The stronger your ankles, glutes, quads, and core, the more support you have when you balance on one leg. Being able to press your foot firmly into the floor and lift the pelvis away from the thigh gives you the stability you need for balancing on one leg. You want strength for stability without rigidity. More discussion of this concept in a bit. 

Flexibility, especially in the feet and ankles, helps us create a stable foundation. Spreading the toes widens our base and literally give us more surface area to stand on. Flexibility in the ankle allows us to adapt to the small shifts of weight while we are standing on one leg. No one is perfectly still when they stand on one leg, and flexibility increases our adaptability to those subtle shifts of weight.

Calm: When the mind is racing, it's difficult to maintain our visual and mental focus and we will tend to fall over. Working on balance encourages us to work on our inner calm. When the mind races, we are no longer present in our body and we lose connection to what is happening in the moment. When we can breathe slowly and bring the mind into focus, we can settle into our body and find the stability we need for balance. Balance is the time to slow down and work toward inner and outer stillness.

We cultivate balance with both strength and ease. As I mentioned earlier, we need enough strength to create stability to hold us up, but we also need ease so that there is no rigidity in our standing leg. If the leg is too rigid, we lose our adaptability; if the leg is too relaxed, we lose our stability. The equality between strength and ease gives us the best chance at balancing on one leg.  

Practicing one legged balance is something we can do throughout the day, not just in yoga class. Practice standing on one leg while brushing your teeth or if you have a standing desk. Start to cultivate the connection of your foot against the floor, spreading your toes and lifting upward through the quads and glutes. Lifting through the pelvic floor and lower abdominals helps as well. Notice what is happening in your mind; can you keep it relaxed while you stand? Let go of the worry about falling over and just balance for as long as you can. When you tip over, regain your composure and try again. You don't lose points for losing your balance, it's all just practice. The more you practice, the easier it gets, and the more stability you will feel on your feet while moving through your day.


If you would like to add balance work to your day, join me online for yoga classes! Click here to see my full schedule of online and on demand yoga classes for all levels!
If you would like to subscribe to my weekly newsletter to stay up to date on all things Purple Room Yoga,  click here!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Quit and Rest: Why these are not "4 letter words"

 As a type A recovering perfectionist, "rest" wasn't always in my vocabulary. If I wasn't moving or doing something "productive," I was asleep. In my 20s I used to have every moment of my day scheduled and I was always on the go. I was living in New York City at the time and bought roller blades so that I could get around the city faster. I was dancing, practicing yoga, and teaching swimming, so clearly wasn't active enough... I always felt a stigma around resting or quitting something, being seen as lazy or not good enough in some way. Someone who quit did so because they weren't "good enough" to continue, and someone who rested was "lazy." Neither of these things are actually true, but these were my deeply held beliefs for much of my teen years and early adult life. Why Quit and Rest aren't actually bad words One cannot "do all the things" unless rest happens. Rest can mean sleep, but it can also mean non-doing. I ...
Read more

Flexibility vs. Mobility as we Age

Image
When it comes to practicing yoga, the difference between Flexibility and Mobility may seem like semantics, but in practice, the difference matters. According to Google, Flexibility is defined as "the quality of bending easily without breaking." This can mean many things when we practice yoga, but is often associated with poses that involve extreme stretching and require certain anatomical allowances, like being in a full split while touching the back foot to your head. When practicing yoga, Flexibility involves stretching the muscles to be able to get deeper and deeper into a pose. This is fine if you do so mindfully and by listening to your body. Some people are naturally flexible, often because they have joint and ligament laxity, where their joints naturally have significant movement just on their own. Other people work toward their flexibility by stretching frequently. Flexibility can be useful, but if you don't have the strength to support the flexibility, you can e...
Read more

The Balance between Strength and Ease

Image
The balance between Strength and Ease is a favorite yoga topic of mine. It's that middle place where you find Yoga, or Union. Trying, but not too hard, and also relaxing, but not too much, is what the yoga practice is all about, both physically and spiritually. You are finding stability, but without the struggle or strain. When you are practicing asanas (the poses), you want to use enough effort in the poses to maintain your stability and balance, but not so much effort that your muscles become hard and immobile. Something rigid will get knocked down easily, but something too soft will have no structure or integrity.  You want to use your muscles to create stability, but with a concurrent sense of relaxation so you still have the ability to adapt to shifts of weight. Imagine Tree pose (or any 1-legged balance pose). The standing leg needs to use enough strength to support the body weight, or you will fall down, but if you make your muscles too hard, you will also fall over. Balance...
Read more