NOTE - This post was originally written for our 'weekly warble' segment in a few Facebook groups for the community local to our gym.

Welcome to the weekly warble here at Ideanthro Movement. Ok let's be honest, I've missed several weeks of recent warbling, but I'm back this week to talk about balance.

Specifically I'd like to talk about the best ways to improve your balance in a way that helps out in everyday life.

To begin this discussion we need to ask ourselves.why we would want to improve our balance. Aside from its various applications in sports (climbing, gymnastics etc) a big reason to want to balance better is to prevent falls.

The next thing we need to ask ourselves is how balance works. In a nutshell, balance is all about your brain perceiving where your body is in space relative to the world under your feet and around you. Your brain must then tell your body how to move in order to stay upright. In this respect, the skill of balance is neurologically different in every situation you encounter. Your brain learns and sends different signals for each different surface you balance on. In particular, balancing on stable objects (like the footpath or a curb) is very different to balancing on something unsteady (like a tightrope or bosu ball). The brain needs to interpret a very different landscape in each case, and the body must respond very differently.

Finally we need to ask ourselves one last thing. Is most of our time spent balancing on stable or unstable surfaces? The answer is stable. We could go further and then ask ourselves "do most falls happen on stable or unstable surfaces?" and we would find that the answer is still 'stable surfaces'.

Now, when we put what we learnt in the last three paragraphs together we come across something interesting. If we want to be better at balance, we need to practice a balance in a wide variety of situations (to replicate the wide array of balance situations that we encounter), but we should mostly be practicing balance on stable surfaces because that's what we mostly encounter.

That's why at Ideanthro Movement we mostly practice balancing on a wide variety of different (but stable). surfaces. Then, every now and again (like this week, as you can see in the photos below) we throw some unstable surfaces into the mix to balance things out (pardon the pun) and also just because it's great fun!

Long story short, if you want better balance, practice it in lots of different ways, but don't fall into the trap of thinking that you need a whole array of different unstable objects. A line on the ground and a foot or two to stand on will be a pretty good place to start!