It’s not often you hear a fitness expert talk about the benefits of balance. But it can actually really improve your performance. If you have balance, you have the ability to control how your body is moving, or how you hold it when stationary. Balance is key is any kind of fitness: strength, cardio, flexibility and so on. Here’s a breakdown of balance benefits!
Body awareness is how aware you are of your own limbs in the space around you. Having balance helps make movement more graceful. It prevents injury when you have a sense that you’re about to trip over equipment in the gym!
When you’re balanced, your knees, ankles, hips and solders are stable. This prevents injury and allows your joints to adapt to your movements.
When you train for balance, you teach your body to work together. This is especially useful when doing your regular training because it helps parts of your body which aren’t being directly used, support the targeted area. This protects from injury. Increased co-ordination is also useful for ball sports which require a certain level of spacial awareness…
When balance training, you’ll find you stumble to begin with. When your balance improves, you won’t do this as much. That’s because your body learns how to rest itself quickly when you go a little off balance. It carries this knowledge through any kind of exercise you do – i.e. when exercising, your body will react a lot quicker to your movements.
With quicker reactions and stronger links with your muscles, your power will increase. This means your overall exercise performance will improve, too.
Training your balance is a challenge for your nervous system. As your nervous system becomes more efficient, it can summon more of your muscle for each lift when weight training. This is because the nervous system is what forces your muscles to move!
If you have a greater balance, you are likely to have good agility. This means you’re nimble and can move your body into the positions it needs to be in, in order to perform exercise. Agility = increased overall performance.