4 Reasons to Improve Your Balance

Improving balance is not something that crosses our mind a lot. Perhaps we don’t even feel like there’s anything to work on with our balance, but there’s always room for improvement. Better balance has positive impacts on our safety as well as on both our physical and mental health. Here are our four reasons to improve balance:

Improved balance helps prevent injuries

From athletes to the elderly, improving balance can help prevent injuries. For example, better balance can help prevent a fall. For the elderly, falls are the cause of over 90% of all hip fractures which is one of the most life-altering and shortening injuries, so we should improve our balance as early as now.

Improving our balance can also lower our risk of an ankle sprain. Spraining an ankle will predispose us to future ankle sprains for life, so doing regular balance exercises is a must.

Improved balance develops control of muscle groups

Balance goes beyond our legs and feet. When we work on our balance, we are using several different muscles from our head to our toes. Pushing our muscle groups to work together in ways they never did before can improve our control of these dormant muscle groups. Learning to use our muscles in synergy can also improve our strength and posture, which can reduce our chances of getting arthritis, back pain, and many other health problems.

If we’re not sure how to work out different muscle groups for better balance, a personal trainer can help. While we can search for simple exercises to improve our balance, getting an instructor can give us safer and more structured routines.

Improved balance enhances performance

With better balance and muscle group coordination, we will find how our body performs day-to-day tasks improves. Our body’s ability to control itself even during challenging movements naturally increases. We will notice improved agility and quicker reaction times. Improved performance can also be observed in our active fitness as we improve our form and technique in our workouts.

Improved balance boosts cognitive function

Having better balance may make us smarter. Challenging areas of our brain responsible for our balance may have benefits for our brain as a whole. Training our balance flexes our brain and improves cognitive function, giving us better memory and thought processes.

Improving our balance has many benefits for our health and fitness. We can incorporate balance work into our strength and conditioning workouts. If we don’t know how to do this, we can get a personal trainer or join a group fitness training class. Joining a group can give us a supportive community that can keep our balance in check.