Balance in Your Forties, Not Your Seventies

Watch someone put a sock on. Some stand there and do it. Others sit down on the bed or reach for the wall, and have stopped noticing that they do.

Standing on one leg is a coordination task. Your ankle and hip send position information up, your brain compares it against what it expected, and small muscles make hundreds of corrections a second. Balance is trainable and it responds fast — weeks, not years. It also decays fast when nothing asks anything of it, which is what a life of chairs, flat floors and two-legged movement amounts to. The life-changing fall in their seventies is the end of a slope that started decades earlier.

Test yourself now, before you read the fix. Stand on one leg, eyes open, arms by your sides. Thirty seconds should be uneventful. Then close your eyes. Ten seconds with your eyes shut is a reasonable standard in your forties and fifties, and plenty of capable adults can't manage it. Oh, and yes, the arms have to stay by your side. As soon as they come off, test is done.

There's a second, easier test. Stand with one foot directly in front of the other, heel to toe, eyes closed. Twenty seconds is a reasonable standard. It's harder than it sounds and it tells you more than the single-leg version, because it takes the wide base of support away without needing any strength at all.

Two things to do about it, one free and one in the gym.

The free one: while you brush your teeth, stand on one leg. Two minutes on the left in the morning, two on the right at night.

The gym one is loading it. Split squats, step-ups and single-leg deadlifts with a kettlebell, 3 sets of 8 each side, once or twice a week. Single-leg work under load is where the strength and the balance meet, and it exposes side-to-side differences. One leg is usually noticeably worse, and this will close that gap.

Nothing about this is hard and none of this needs equipment to start. Stop making excuses and get started.

If you'd rather have it programmed for you, book a free, no-obligation 15-minute chat with Jeremy or Beth at crossfitchiltern.com. No hard sell.