Benefits of Exercise - Balance

Photo by Evan Clark Unsplash

An often overlooked benefit to strength training is balance. It is not surprising that we tend to lose muscle mass and bone density as we get older. We also now know that we can slow these processes down a bit by strength training. We also covered how being stronger and having higher bone density protected us from injury.

What seems pretty obvious, once you say it out loud, is that a better sense of balance protects us from injury as well. It does not take a great leap of logic to figure out that decreasing your risk of falling over is a good way to prevent injury. The question we want to address today is how strength training improves your sense of balance.

If you are doing what I would consider "effective" strength training, the majority of the movements you will be performing will be compound movements. If you've never heard of compound movements, it is simply a reference to a movement that uses multiple muscle groups, usually across multiple joints. For example, a dumbbell curl is a simple movement, involving the biceps and the elbow. The squat, in contrast, is a compound movement that uses glutes, hamstrings, quads and several other muscle groups and crosses the hip joint, knees and ankles.

Because these compound movements, taken through a full range of motion, train your entire body as a complete system, they not only train all the major muscle groups, but they use all of the smaller, often neglected muscles in a way that your body naturally uses them every day. If you go to a gym and sit on a machine doing leg extensions, you are training your quadriceps, but you are doing it in a way that isolates those muscles rather than using them as part of a complete "body" system. This especially leaves out all those smaller "forgotten" muscles because extending your knees does not require their involvement.

Compound movements train the entire system in a way that causes you to use major and minor muscle groups, working together to produce a particular movement so that all of these muscles are trained to work together. It is often these smaller muscles that are charged with maintaining our balance. If they are trained to work as an entire system, these muscles get better at their job.  If they are better at their job, you are safer.

If you want to start working on that now so that you will not lose as much of your ability to balance as you age, or if you are already at an age where you are starting to notice that your strength and balance are not what they used to be, contact me and let's work to get that back, reverse the effects of the years and keep you stronger, healthier, less injury prone and more independent.