Exercises to improve balance

 I rarely read Jane Brody’s “Personal Health” columns in The New York Times because she annoys me. But I must give her credit for alerting me to a little book about balance: Falling is Not an Option: A Way to Lifelong Balance by George Locker. His thesis is that our ability to balance comes from muscle knowledge—that is, muscles automatically knowing what to do. The muscles he talks about are postural muscles—those muscles that engage spontaneously to keep our bodies erect against gravity’s downward pull. If we don’t use those muscles enough, they muscles “forget” how to maintain balance. You can’t always rely on your skeleton to hold you up. If your skeleton starts to tip, you want your muscles to set you to rights.

His solution to this problem is to perform exercises that activate and use the postural muscles—those weight-bearing muscles that are engaged when our knees and ankles are bent (picture skiers, surfers, skateboarders). In such postures, your body is weighted and your muscles become engaged, especially your thigh (quadriceps) and butt (glute) muscles.

I was going to include images of one of his exercises but was not successful at copying them from his book (I have the digital version). I guess you’ll just have to buy his book—or take up surfing, skiing, or skateboarding.

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