Hi there, Mark. Brian. We’re coming to you from Fitness4LifePT, and we’re gonna talk to you this month about balance exercises. Why? Because balance is good, and if you don’t have balance, you might fall and hurt yourself and then come in here, which we’d love to see you, but we’d rather you not hurt yourself to come to see us.
We’d rather you not hurt yourself tripping around the house. Balance is like anything else. If you don’t use it, you lose it. It’s kind of like an exercise, you know, if you’re, you’re not working at it, eventually it’s gonna start declining. There’s a lot of reasons why balance can start to decline after a while. Age, just being one of them. There’s other problems, like joint problems if you’ve ever had a joint replacement. Neurological problems also plays with your sensory input. Neuropathy if you can’t feel your feet. It’s important to have balance because most of us have things lying around our house and different surfaces to walk on.
So being aware of your surroundings, not tripping on a dog toy or a kid toy, or somebody running out in front of you, being able to catch yourself. Being in the grocery store when people are walking by quickly and just feeling steady on your feet. It’s all important just to be able to prevent anything from happening.
Balance typically as people age, like myself, you have a tendency to get a little bit less balanced with your life. So it’s easy to lose your balance. Big problem then that that older adults have is that they fall, they break a hip, and then for a lot of them that does them in, so you want to balance, like Brian said, it’s something you want to keep up with, it’s something you have to work at. It’s an activity that you can practice, you can get better at, but it’s something that you definitely need to have.
There is a study that showed one of the biggest features to help people get or improve their balance was looking at and what helps or what makes people fall. Things like loose throw rugs in the house or objects in the house, or lack of muscle strength.
What they found was lack of muscle strength had the biggest effect on improving somebody’s balance. Even then, these things on the floor are a concern. You want to make sure that you make your house safe for yourself. But strengthening is gonna be your best bet for helping you too.
What we’re gonna do this month is go over a few different balance exercises that you can do at home, and one other thing along that same line, a lot of these balance exercises we’re going to recommend you do barefoot at times because they’ve also shown that weak feet, or incorrect alignment of the feet, also contributes to poor balance. That’s gonna be important too. Stay tuned to our YouTube channel where we’re gonna be telling you a little bit about that also. So if you have further questions, contact us at Fitness4LifePT.com.