The Hidden Dimensions of Balance

Most falls occur by surprise—encountering a slippery surface, an unexpected change in the height of a curb, distractions.

For example, this is probably a familiar scenario: you get up to leave a crowded restaurant, focusing your eyes between the tables on your way to the door. Suddenly a friend calls over and you turn your head while you keep walking forward at the same time.

There’s a moment of sensory overwhelm between organizing your body toward the sound of a friend and the necessary visual input to orient your movements toward the door. This sensory overwhelm involves holding your breath, which means limited mobility in your rib cage and most of the muscles in your entire trunk, making balance more tricky.

Sensory overwhelm or doing too many different things at once can lead to some of the worst falls.

In order to really improve balance, it’s important to focus our attention on the unexpected and develop our ability to manage sensory overwhelm.

So how do we do this?

Below I suggest some movement lessons to strengthen our ability to focus despite sensory overwhelm, but first of all, I encourage you to approach these movement challenges with a playful attitude.

Too often when we get tested for balance in the doctors office or during a physical therapy session, there is so much tension over getting a good measurement to record that it ends up hurting our balance and our abilities. A tense environment contributes to sensory overwhelm and anxiety.

Let’s observe our breathing and eyesight. When we tighten our breathing by holding our breath and tighten our eyes by squinting, we increase our anxiety. When we breathe more easily and fully and see around ourselves with softer eyes, we also move more easily. 

Observing and exploring sight, breathing, and balance

1.     Stand in a way that you feel is most comfortable and feels most secure. Best if you could stand either near a chair you can put your hands on the back of or near a wall or a counter. But only use your hands for balance if you need to.

2.     Close your eyes. Observe. Do you wobble a bit compared to when your eyes are open? Do you hold your breath when you close your eyes?

3.     Observe differences that you can feel in simply standing with your eyes open for several seconds and then closed for several seconds.

4.     Next, with your eyes open, inhale and hold your breath. Can you stand on one leg as well while you hold your breath? Try doing this on each leg. You might find there’s a difference from one leg to another in terms of your feeling of secure balance.

5.     Can you close your eyes, hold your breath and stand on one leg? Be careful. I’ve taught this to many people and some lost their balance.

6.     Open your eyes and feel yourself breathing easily. Maintain that feeling of ease and breathing and full visual access to the environment, and once again shift to one leg for several seconds and then to the other.

Another way to overcome sensory overwhelm is instead of closing your eyes as you stand on one leg, try turning your head from side to side.

This lesson is helpful to do daily for a while until you find that you have greater movement awareness when you move through the world full of sensory inputs and distractions.

Reading through obstacles

Be careful doing this as you won’t have a chair or wall to rely on as you did with the earlier lesson. You might find it fun to do this movement challenge with a small group of friends.

This movement lesson is a great way to adapt to sensory overwhelm. It challenges our abilities to react to the unexpected by walking through a home-built obstacle course, which you can easily construct by throwing a few pillows or books on the ground in an arbitrary manner.

As you begin, focus your eyes ahead of you while also feeling the obstacles with your feet. You might choose to move around your obstacles or move over them.

Can you maintain a soft focus and maintain your breathing?

Only after you feel comfortable with your obstacle course, you can try walking backward over the same obstacles.

A video clip from the Embodied Balance program showing a woman walking through obstacles on the floor.

As you improve your ability to weave through and over obstacles on the floor, you might find that you breathe more easily and that you could actually face a greater challenge by reading something you hold in your hands as you navigate the course.

You can also change the obstacle course so you’re facing fresh challenges.

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Having good balance isn’t just about keeping our feet under ourselves. It also involves easy, full breathing and managing the visual stimuli of the environment. Breath and sight are the hidden dimensions of balance.

-Frank Wildman, PhD

How to Develop a Body of Qualities

If we can improve the quality of our movements, we can better preserve our bodies and continue to do the things we enjoy for a much longer time.

Too often we consider our exercise programs by focusing on measuring the quantities of our movements -- how far did we run, how fast, how many reps did we do -- instead of evaluating the quality of our movements -- how smoothly did our joints move, how lightly did our limbs feel, how agile was our experience.

It's easy to understand this emphasis on the quantitative: cultural factors can in effect push us toward quantitative movement. As we watched the latest Olympic games, we can reflect on millennia of measuring our movements in numbers in order to compare ourselves to each other -- how fast can we run, swim or bike, how far can we throw, how high can we jump. With advent the Industrial Age, researchers studied how the human body could move in mechanical harmony with the machines of the assembly lines.

Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times

Questions like how far or long a person should run were researched endlessly, but with what agility a person runs -- the quality of the running -- was not investigated. So more and more today, the emphasis on the measurable aspect of movement pervades our perceptions of our own movement and how we exercise.

We may be enthralled by the quality of athletes' movements -- the gracefulness of wide receivers snagging a catch along the sidelines, or the sleek, long-limbed guards of the NBA negotiating the length of court, or runners with beautifully smooth strides, or dancers, skaters and skiers who define elegant movement, but we rarely value the same grace of movement in our own exercise. We focus too much on the quantity of our movement (How far did I walk? Did I exercise enough?) and too little on the quality and gracefulness of our movement. This emphasis on quantity over quality can lead to our bodies breaking down and reduce our movement abilities altogether.

Imagine a car with one half-flat tire and a transmission not fully lubricated. It probably wouldn't keep moving for long and would deliver a bumpy ride until its breakdown. Similarly bumpy or ungraceful movement of our human bodies can lead to more damaging injuries and the inability to do loved activities or even day-to-day tasks.

If we can improve the quality of our movements, we can better preserve our bodies and continue to do the things we enjoy for a much longer time.

Consider some of these questions when evaluating your workout routine and determining how much emphasis you put on the quantitative vs. the qualitative.

• Are measurable quantities -- repetitions, time, weight, speed -- more important to you than your quality of motion?

• Can you assess your typical workout's success to include your gracefulness in performing the movement?

• When you move, do you feel you move more like a machine or an animal? What image of a graceful animal could you bring to your workout?

Imagine the next time you exercise not counting or measuring in your mind, but instead freeing your ability to feel sensations. Use exercise as a way to increase your sixth sense, your proprioceptive sense, your ability to observe the inner workings and feelings in your body rather than the five senses that relate us to the outside world. Can you observe yourself running smoothly, how hard are you on your hips, legs, joints? How can you make your limbs move more lightly, your landing softer?

By aiming to only achieve goals that are easy to quantify, we can create excessive tension in the effort to achieve those goals, which ends up being counterproductive.

If you intend to exercise regularly all your life, the quality of your movement trumps quantity.

Oiling Your Hips the Easy Way

In this lesson, you’ll learn an enjoyable and exhilarating way to release stiffness in your hips, knees, and lower back. 

1.    Take a moment to observe your contact with the floor while lying on your back. Calm down and focus your attention inside your body. Then, come to sitting with your knees bent so the bottoms of your feet stand on the floor. Take your left hand and reach around the outside of your left knee holding on to the outside edge of your foot, near your toes, thumb together with your other fingers. Lift your foot in the air and set it down a few times and feel what your pelvis and lower back need to do to help you. Feel free to use your right hand on the floor for support.

Each time you lift the foot up and set it down, have the knee cross underneath your arm so it flips to the outside of the arm and back to the inside several times. Do it slowly so you can feel what happens in your hip joint to create this turning of the knee under the arm. Rest on your back.

2.    Come to sitting and hold on to the foot arranged exactly the same way as before. Lift the foot up and set it down somewhere else on the floor. In fact, lift it up and set it down in as many different places on the floor as you can.

Cross it to the other side of your body and even find a couple of ways to set the foot behind you, over your head. Rest on your back again.

3.     Now, arrange yourself the same way with your right hand reaching around the outside of your right knee and holding on to the outside edge of your foot. As in step 1, explore how to flip the knee back and forth under the right elbow. Rest.

4.     Sit again with the right hand holding the outside edge of the right foot. As in step 2, explore all the places you can touch on the floor around your body with this foot. Rest on your back with your legs long.

5.    Come to sitting with both of your knees pointing to your right and both of your feet to the left. This means you will be side sitting with your left foot just in back of you on the floor and the right foot relating to the left knee.In fact, the left knee will probably be touching the bottom of the right foot.

At the same time, hold onto the outside edge of your left foot with your left hand and the outside edge of your right foot with your right hand. Lift both feet from the floor and simultaneously flip both of your knees under both of your elbows. As the knees get straighter, come to side sitting in a mirror image of your starting position. Your knees are now to the left and your feet to the right, with your left foot touching your right thigh.

✓Awareness Advice:
As you move your feet from one side of your body to the other, in side sitting, you will experience yourself rolling on your pelvis from side to side and you will need to lift your feet high in the air for the knees to flip under the elbows. Make sure you don’t strain or hold your breath. Work to make it easy.

Take your feet and knees from side to side this way, several times. Make it easier each time. Rest on your back with your arms and legs long.

6.    Come to side sitting again. Choose your favorite side. Again, hold on with both hands to both outside edges of your feet. Once again, you’ll be changing to side sitting on the other side by flipping your knees under your arms, but this time try to do it by sliding your feet on the floor the entire time, as the knees change from side to side. Rest on your back.

✓Awareness Advice:
As you do this movement, you will discover that your feet slide out away from you and back again along the same line on the floor while the knees flip from side to side and your pelvis rolls from side to side.

When you get up to walk, notice if your legs and back have more freedom.

-Frank Wildman, PhD

This “Oiling Your Hips the Easy Way” exercise is excerpted from the book, The Busy Person’s Guide to Easier Movement, by Frank Wildman, PhD, which has common-sense lessons connecting the mind and body through movement to help people move with more ease, comfort and efficiency.

Tired of Sitting in a Chair? Try Walking on It with Your Pelvis

The purpose of “The Pelvic Walk” is to help you discover how to sit more lightly, move your pelvis more easily while sitting, and turn in your chair while performing activities in the workplace or home

1.    Sit comfortably in the middle of your chair without leaning back. Make sure your feet are flat on the floor. Feel yourself sitting as tall as possible. Separate your hands and rest the palm of each hand on your thighs.

✓Awareness Advice:
Make sure you don’t slump in your chair as you progress through the movements. To heighten your sensation of the movement, you can close your eyes, but remember to maintain a physical attitude of being upright and looking outward.

2.     Slide the right side of your pelvis forward in the chair as if you wanted to reach straight ahead with your right knee. Then, slide your pelvis and leg back in the chair. You will be pivoting on your left buttock and sitz bone. Repeat this movement several times until it becomes lighter and more comfortable. Rest briefly and then return to your starting position.

✓Awareness Advice:
Be sure that the work performed in these movements is done with your torso. Keep your feet flat on the floor and do not push too hard with your legs.

3.    Repeat the same movement moving the left buttock and thigh forward and backward, pivoting on your right side. Which side glides more easily on your chair?

4.    Explore each side again and observe how much your head and shoulders turn. Rest briefly and then return to your starting position.

5.    Keeping both feet on the floor, lift the right side of your pelvis off the chair and bring it back down. Do you tilt your whole body to the left, or can you do the movement shortening the right side of your waist and keeping your head approximately in the center?

✓Awareness Advice:
If at any point you cannot feel the movement clearly, or cannot perform it to your satisfaction, stop, close your eyes and imagine performing the movement. Then imagine what it would feel like if you were moving and picture the movement happening.

6.    Repeat the movement on the other side. Again, which side is easier? Rest.

7.    Return to your starting position in the middle of your chair and place your hands on your knees and walk your buttock forward. Then walk the other side forward until you reach the edge of your chair. Then walk your pelvis backward. As you walk your buttocks forward and backward in your chair, make the movement easier.

8.    Return to sliding each side of your pelvis forward and backward alternately while looking straight ahead. Work to make the movement easier as you slide one side after the other

 -Frank Wildman, PhD

This “Pelvic Walk” exercise is excerpted from the book, The Busy Person’s Guide to Easier Movement, by Frank Wildman, PhD, which has common-sense lessons connecting the mind and body through movement to help people move with more ease, comfort and efficiency.

The Power of Moving like a Child

As we age, a lifetime of injuries and poor movement habits can limit our capabilities, coordination, and mobility. The best way to break through these restrictive boundaries is to explore and discover new ways to move and babies offer a great example of how to do that.

Photo by Alexander Dummer on Unsplash

Babies have to learn new ways to move every day, all day. Rolling, reaching, putting a foot in the mouth, twisting, turning, scooting — these are all ways that babies learn to observe their world, to eat, and to move.

All humans learn to walk, to sing, to dance by first learning new ways to move. Think of any skill you ever acquired in your entire lifetime, and you can appreciate the fact that you acquired that skill by altering and redesigning your habits.

So to change our inefficient and possibly painful movement habits, we need to expand our repertoire of movements like a child. The first step in this process is first sensing with precision how we move and how our whole body is involved in any movement. Rather than exercise, we need to think of sensercise — moving to increase our sensory capacity.

Often it’s very difficult for many people to sense parts of their body that don’t seem obviously connected to a movement they are performing. For example, if you lift a weight in a standing position, traditional ways of thinking would focus attention on the bicep muscles of the arm, which need to contract to lift something. However, in the real world of gravity, if you lift something in front of yourself using just your biceps — even a bottle of water — you would fall forwards as the weight shifts your center of gravity in front of yourself.

In order to become more efficient, effective, and stronger, you need to sense the other parts of your body that are involved in the act of lifting. Sense how the calf muscles push the front of the foot into the ground a small amount to help counterbalance the weight in front of us. Sense how the back and belly work to take the weight from your hands and arms through your shoulders and down your spine.

We need to sense how any movement requires an integration of all body parts — not just the obvious major muscle group that’s acting the hardest.

This kind of attention is how we improve our ability to sense and change difficult movement habits and painful postures. The awareness of how different parts of our body contribute to accomplishing an action can unleash the power of an integrated body and lessen strain on any one set of muscles.

Greater awareness can mean the difference between strain, excess tension, and even the feeling of weakness and smooth, confident, coordinated movement.

How do we move to gain awareness? If our mind is captured by the effort of achieving a goal or we count how many repetitions we’re performing, that’s where our attention is trapped. Instead, learning to move in order to feel how we move can restore our integrated, whole body movement we once had as children and is the secret to gaining greater awareness.

With greater awareness, we can begin to explore movement like a baby in non-linear ways with twists and turns, breaking free of the linear movements exercise equipment can limit us to.

This lesson is an example of the sort of exploratory movement I’m talking about; it asks you to learn how to trust yourself to be in touch with your body and brain through your sense of movement.

Before you start this lesson, read through it and look to the photos for guidance. This mental rehearsal will help you unleash your physical imagination.

• GO SLOWLY — Take your time, you’ll learn more!

• INSIST ON COMFORT — If it hurts, it’s not helping you. Never try to override pain if you feel it.

• USE YOUR IMAGINATION — Allow the movement to become very clear and lucid in your mind, like a scene from a movie.

• REST FREQUENTLY — These movements, while gentle and pleasurable, may cause slight strain because you are using parts of muscles you may not have used in a long time, or you may be using them in ways that are not familiar.

• CHOOSE A COMFORTABLE SPACE — Make sure that you have space around you to move and that your clothes are loose enough to not restrain your movement.

Releasing the Hips into Pleasure

Photo RJ Muna

Intention: To find a comfortable and pleasurable way of releasing excess work in the stiff muscles of your inner legs and hips.

Starting Position: Lie on your back with your arms down at your sides and your legs long.

1. Feel the pressure under your heels and notice whether you feel more pressure from the floor touching your left heel compared to your right. Is the pressure on the outside of the heel more apparent on one side than the other? Also observe the pressure under your calf muscles. Does that pressure help tell you which of your two legs is pointed more to the ceiling and which is pointed more to the outside? Make sure your legs are relaxed. Don’t try to hold them in any particular way.

2. Very gently turn your right leg farther to the right and let your knee softly bend so that the outside edge of your right foot begins to slide on the floor up toward you. Then, slide the edge of your foot back down the same track it went up. Repeat the movement several times, very slowly, searching for the path of least resistance and effort as you slide the outside edge of your foot up and down on the floor.

Change Your Age Tip: As you slide your foot up and down, make sure your knee hangs open completely so that there’s no work happening in the inner muscles of your thigh. The more unnecessary muscular work you perform, the more difficult, heavy, and resistant the movement of the leg becomes. Every so often let your leg rest, with your knee bent and your foot pulled up, to make sure you are letting go of your inner thigh muscles.

After exploring the movement of sliding the edge of your right foot up and down the floor, rest and observe what has changed in the way your leg rests on the floor. Is your leg softer? Is it pointing in a different direction than earlier? Does your hip feel softer? You might even find that your lower back has released to the floor on the right side.

Photo RJ Muna

3. Perform the same exploration of this soft and lazy movement on the left side. Is it easier or harder than on the right? Notice whether your eyes or even your head want to move to the left when you move your left leg up and down. Rest. Feel the expansion in your pelvis and the release of excess work in your legs. Pause with your legs long and arms down at your sides.

4. Turn both of your legs open, with the knees hanging apart, and slide the outside edges of both of your feet up toward yourself at the same time. As you go up and down this way, slowly and gently, feel what your back and your pelvis are doing to assist the movement.

As the edges of your feet slide up, keep some distance between them.

Photo RJ Muna

5. Rest with your arms on the floor above your head and your elbows slightly bent out to the sides. Once again, slide the outside edges of both feet up toward yourself and leave them there with your knees hanging open. Now let your head easily roll from side to side while breathing deeply.

Rest in this position, with the knees suspended and the arms open, and feel the comfort of being like a baby sleeping on the floor. Let your ribs move freely as you breathe. If letting your knees hang open feels uncomfortable, place a pillow under the side of each knee to give yourself more support.

-Frank Wildman, PhD