The importance of balance training and how to easily train it

Stefano Tripney (Movnat L3 certified trainer is making a number of excellent points about balance in his Instagram post below.

What I would add is that balance training is one of the fundamental physical skills that can be trained easily without risk and without specialized equipment. Balancing is a skill that is very amenable to training. Here’s a possible progression:

• walk on a line on the ground: find any line on the ground and walk alongside it. If you’re a beginner, this will be challenging enough and your exercise. If you’re more advanced: look out for line son the ground when walking around and try and balance on them while walking at a fast pace. I guarantee you you will be feeling your core muscles and all your stabilisators will also get trained. When walking is fine on the line, try to change direction with a pivot reverse technique.
• walk on a sidewalk ledge: easy to do, low risk and you get used to small height. Next, practice the pivot reverse.
• walk on a rail at ground level, then pivot reverse.
• same on elevated rail.

You can also incorporate balance into many static exercises, for example:

• planks while balancing on the back of a bench
• same with push-ups

I’ve been in the fitness industry for long enough now to have noticed that balance gets little play. It’s underutilized, under appreciated, and often misunderstood as a training modality in and of itself. # A common observation is the prevalence of people seeking out a hand balance practice before they even have decent balance as a function of footwork and locomotion. # Next is certainly stability training via the use of an unstable surface. Pick one. Again, I’m confused as to why trainers choose to simulate an unstable surface when 99.9% of the time the ground never moves. It is the instability of the individual on the surface that needs to respond to shifting parts in relation to a stable surface, not the other way around. # Last is stationary balance. Better than the previous example but it often never leaves this phase and function remains divorced from practicality. # What’s lost is a host of external and internal sensation working in tandem. It’s feeling. Perception. Balance is the bridge between internal and external awareness. You feel me?

A post shared by Stefano Tripney (@captainstefano) on Mar 20, 2018 at 1:52pm PDT