What is balance?
In simple terms, balance is the ability to walk to your living room or bathroom in the day or night or across your lawn/driveway/woods and stay upright. Physiologically, balance is a complex interaction of sensory information from the eyes, position receptors (proprioceptors) from the muscles and tendons, and input from the inner ear. This coordination of sensory input and motor output through the brain, muscles and joints allows us to maintain our center of gravity and therefore our sense of balance.
Balance, like a lot of things, is a skill that can be improved. It is a learned movement pattern which requires practice to gain, regain and maintain. As we transition from childhood to adulthood, we generally improve our balance through practice during progressively more intense and complex physical activity and exercise. With time, we often see a gradual decrease in the amount of both physical activity and exercise, leading to a decline in the amount of practice we do for our balance. In addition, we experience age-related changes in our bodies that contribute to declines in balance and increase our risk of falling.
Most commonly, we experience a decrease in range of motion and strength in the joints of the ankles, knees and hips, slowing of our natural reflexes and reaction time. We also experience vision changes that reduce our ability to monitor our environment. These normal aging processes often contribute to an increase in frequency of falling, but there can be other contributors as well. self-assessment of your own ability to balance is the Single Leg Stance test. According to a study in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, if you are unable to balance on one leg for five seconds, you are at risk for an injurious fall.