Adding "Distraction" to Your Balance Poses

by Baxter

A Beauty Holding a Ball by Toyohara Chikanobu

My 2015 (healthy) obsession with balance is in full swing, and as a result, lots of folks have been sharing their personal yoga-related balance poses with me. Thanks, everyone! In addition, I get forwarded a lot of articles about balance from Nina and others as they show up in the media these days. Last week, Nina forwarded a New York Times article Training the Mind to Ward Off Falls that really piqued my interest. 

Noting the well-known connection between falls, fractures, and dysfunction and death in the elderly, the article reported on an experiment in balance taking place in Wichita, Kansas with a group of elderly exercisers. Their exercise program, designed by an exercise physiologist who heads Wichita State University’s Center for Physical Activity and Aging, includes a balance section in which the participants stand on 3-inch spongy squares of foam padding to require them to pay more attention to their balance than normal. Then, they add in “cognitive distraction drills,” such as simultaneously dropping a ball from one hand to another while gradually moving the distance between the hands further apart. There are other techniques employed as well. And the reason for this is explained as follows: 

“Incorporating mental exercises into a physical fitness class is based on the idea that so-called cognitive distraction drills can help improve balance — particularly when it’s needed most.”

The theory is that improving a person’s ability to “dual-task”— in this case balancing while attending to other stimuli (the cognitive distractions drills)—can improve overall balance. Since falls often happen when we are inattentive to the environment we are moving through, if you could keep good balance while doing other tasks, like these drills, it might translate into improved underlying balance ability for when you encounter some unexpected situation, such as an uneven sidewalk while your dog is running in front of you or a slippery sidewalk while you're talking on the phone. Their on-site experience in Wichita seems to support this assertion, with their program participants reporting improved balance, but formal studies or identifying which distraction drills work best is still a ways off. 

In some ways, we already do this in many yoga class settings. For example, getting into Tree pose might initially involve lots of close attention to the foundational stuff that is needed to balance well in the pose, such as the work for the bottom foot and leg and the alignment of the torso and spine. But your instructor will often then ask you to move your attention, while still in Tree pose, to some other focus, such the movement of your breath in a certain way, or a particular area of the body that may not be directly related to maintaining balance, or even the addition of sound or chanting work.

The Wichita techniques also blends nicely with the idea of “controlled instability” that I wrote about in my post News on Balance, Falling, and Yoga, where you add variable changes to your balance poses to make them gradually more challenging. Inspired by this new info, this week my Weekly Yoga Balance pose combines the hand-to-hand ball drop with a one-legged standing balance pose (coming soon to the blog). In my classes this week, students have already reported that it was easier to balance after they added the ball drop drill than when we did it simply by balancing on one leg…very interesting! 

I’ll be excited to see any future formal results from the work coming out of Wichita, but in the meantime, try adding some cognitive distraction drills into your yoga balance poses and see how you do. For example, try counting backwards from 100 by subtracting 7 each time: 100, 93, 86, etc., while doing King Dancer (Natarajasana)! 

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