How We Balance

by Nina

Kim Schleicher, Age 60, by Melina Meza

It turns out that our ability to balance is surprisingly complex, requiring the cooperation of three different systems in our bodies. I thought today we should have a look at all three of those systems, as understanding what influences your ability to balance will help you see what you can improve with yoga practice and what you cannot affect. The three different systems in your body that affect your ability to balance are: 

Vestibular System: The three canals in your inner ears provide your brain with information about linear and angular positions of your body with respect to gravity. For example, are you standing on a flat surface, such as a floor or a sidewalk or are you standing on an uneven surface, such as a rocky path or walking down a set of stairs? 

Visual System: Your eyes provide your brain with information about the position of your body relative to other objects in your environment, including their depth, velocity and motion. And you use that information about your environment to orient yourself. For example, when you’re walking outside, you use the horizon to tell you what an upright position is, and inside a house, you’re using the angles of the room in which you’re standing in the same way. If you have poor eyesight, have you noticed what happens to your ability to balance without your glasses or contacts? Or have you ever closed your eyes in Tree pose? 

Somatic Sensory System: Sensors in your body provides your brain with information about where your body is in space so you know how to make adjustments to keep your balance. There are two different somatic sensors: exteroception and proprioception. 

Exteroception is the ability to feel what is interacting with the exterior of your body. Sensors on your skin allow you to feel the outside environment. For example, if you are walking outside, are you walking on solid ground or sinking into mud? Even if you’re not on your feet, you take in information about the surface you’re balancing on, for example, try kneeling on a stack of blanks vs. on the floor. 

Proprioception is the ability to tell where one body part is in relation to another. Sensors in all your muscles and joints allow you to feel from the inside how your body is moving in space.The classic test for this is to have you close your eyes and then use your hand to touch your nose. And, in fact, proprioception is what allows you to walk around in the dark. 

Although you cannot use yoga to influence your vestibular and vision systems (and they do tend to deteriorate somewhat with age), you can use yoga to improve your somatic sensory system. So let’s take a closer look at both exteroception and proprioception next.

Also, keep in mind, that even with all three of these systems functioning perfectly, your body won’t be able to respond well to the information it’s receiving from your brain if you’re very weak or stiff. So working on strength, flexibility, and agility are also key for maintaining your ability to balance. Maintaining mental focus in the face of distraction—because in the real world we’re often distracted—is also key, so you can work on mental focus by practicing meditation and also by doing your poses where there is some distraction, such as at the beach or at home with some kids in the room.

Yoga and Exteroception 

By practicing your yoga asanas with bare feet you are increasing their sensitivity. That improves the exteroception on the bottom of your feet, which will improve your ability to balance. And once you are comfortable with your balance on a wood floor or a thin yoga mat, you can vary the surface on which you practice to further increase your exteroception. Try practicing on a rug or carpet a foam mat, or even a firm mattress or doing a balance pose with half your standing foot on the mat or standing on a foam block. Or practice yoga outside on the grass or at the beach on the sand. 

We also recommend practicing yoga balancing poses where you balance on other parts of your body to improve exteroception in other areas. Try Side Plank pose (Vasithasana) variations to work on hands and the sides of your feet. Try Boat pose (Navasana) variations to work on your buttocks area. Try Hunting Dog pose to work on your shins as well as your hands. 

Taking vision out of the equation also helps improve exteroception as you’ll need to work with your sense of touch to compensate for lack of sight. So you can experiment by practicing in a darkened room or keeping your eyes closed. 

Yoga and Proprioception

Doing a variety of poses takes your body into all different kinds of configurations. And practicing without a mirror—which is typically how we do yoga—helps you feel all those different positions from the inside out as you sense your own alignment without using your eyes. That will help refine your proprioception. So take some time to really feel your own alignment. Are you arms even in Warrior 2? Are you knees actually straight in your standing poses? Is your head really aligned directly over your torso?

Also, be sure to practice a wide variety of poses rather than just doing the same 10 every day. And when you’ve been practicing for a few years, you might even want to invent some new variations to keep things fresh and challenging, as Baxter has done with his Balance Pose of the Week, or at least search them out.

To take your proprioception to another level, you can try working with more subtle alignment cues. For example, you could work with your shoulder blades, your collar bones, your inner thighs, or something even more esoteric like your psoas muscles . Sometimes there is an area you are not used to even sensing and, at first, it will be hard to feel something there. But the more you bring your mind to it, the easier it will be to sense that area and eventually to move it.

Taking vision out of the equation helps improve proprioception as you’ll need to work with your sense of where your body is in a space to compensate for lack of sight. That’s how you can walk in the dark! So you can experiment by practicing in a darkened room or keeping your eyes closed.

And now can I take a moment to say that we have more than five senses—way, way more? Today I discussed two senses that are typically excluded from the big five, your vestibular system and your proprioception. And there are a lot more where those came from! 

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Planning a Practice for Improving Balance

by Shari

We've had a question about how to practice when you want to work on balance. We're going to take our time addressing this issue because there are several factors involved in balance. When you plan a daily balance practice, it is important to include all six basic balance components:

1.  Strength: Strengthening your legs is critical. Leg muscles that need to be strong for good balance include the quadriceps, hamstrings, adductors, gluteal, and ankle muscles. (Please see Baxter’s recent posts on feet and ankles). In addition, the back muscles specifically the back extensors, are also important.
2. Proprioception: The ability to sense where we are in space is critical for balance. Practicing with an emphasis on proprioception can help maintain or even increase this ability.
3. Central Nervous System Reactivity: The ability to coordinate movements of your eyes is essential to seeing objects in your environment clearly while you are in motion, and other central nervous system reactions help you maintain balance.
4. Postural Control: Standing well is the critical component for maintaining balance.
5. Gait: Varying how fast and slow you walk, as well as the sizes and directions of step, can help you stay more nimble and avoid falling.
6. Vestibular System: The vestibular system is the sensory system that contributes to movement and sense of balance. Together with the cochlea, a part of the auditory system, it constitutes the labyrinth of the inner ear in most mammals, situated in the vestibulum in the inner ear.

You can target your specific “challenge” areas by varying how you incorporate these components in your practice.

Strength

We need dynamic as well as static strength to prevent falling. Simple ways to strengthen your legs can be standing up and down from a standard height chair without using your arms to assist you. How slowly or quickly you do this can add to the variability for the muscles. Holding the position at various points in going down and coming up is also good. Working until your legs feel fatigue is the key to strengthening these muscles. But please remember these types of quadriceps exercises load the knees significantly and they could potentially aggravate an arthritic knee. So be careful.

Another way to build leg strength is a stair-stepping routine of stepping up and down one step with one leg and then changing and doing it on the other leg. You can also side step up and down with one leg as well as back stepping up and down with one leg. Try not to use the handrails unless you absolutely need to. Varying the speed of the step is good, too.

So now to translate this to yoga poses: think Warrior 2, Warrior 1, Extended Side Angle pose (Parvakonasana) and Powerful pose (Utkatasana). Move into and out of these poses first as a flow, pivoting your feet to keep changing directions. Then move into and out of these poses more quickly. Having a friend call out the poses so you can’t anticipate them can be fun—putting together your own sequence to delight your practice buddies! Then working to hold the poses with a timer to build strength. Start with a doable time, for example, ten seconds, and then increase it slowly. Thirty seconds is actually an eternity to hold a pose that is difficult for you. Varying how low you go into a pose is also valuable. Stepping into poses but not taking the actual pose also will challenge your reactions especially if someone else is also calling it out to you.

For back strength (this also includes gluteal muscles), try Locust pose (Salabasana) with arms and legs, as well as an all-fours position with opposite arm and leg lefts (Baxter calls this Hunting Dog pose—see Hunting Dog Pose for complete information on how to do this pose).

For ankles, try lunges with an emphasis on the back foot, toe rises and rocks with no hands (with both legs or one at a time). 
 
Proprioception

Closing your eyes while you practice can help with proprioception. For example, do toe rises and heel rocks but now close your eyes.

You can also work on an unstable surface, such as a foam mat (thick), an inflated air bed, your own bed or a couch (be creative and safe when choosing the unstable surface). Try standing in Tadasana (Mountain pose) with your feet hips-width apart and then with feet together on an unstable surface (first with your eyes open and then closed). After Tadasana, try heel-toe rocks on your unstable surface, first with your eyes open and then closed if possible. If you feel really adventuresome, try some standing poses on this surface, such as Warrior 2, Triangle pose, and Downward-Facing Dog or Hunting Dog pose as shown above. If this is doable, try closing your eyes and doing these poses on an unstable surface. Please make sure that you don’t fall off of whatever you are on because that would really be counterproductive.
 
Central Nervous System

Now let’s add the central nervous system challenge. Standing on an unstable surface, use your eyes to track a moving object. If you are doing this with a friend, he or she can hold a bright object in their hands while you use your eyes to follow their movement in front of you. Do not move your head or body, just use your eyes to track the object’s movement.

Now you can do a dynamic resistive exercise together. Stand facing each other palm to palm with your hands at shoulder height. One person is the leader and the other is the follower. The leader slowly starts to push into the follower’s hands and the follower matches their push into them with an equal push toward them. The leader keeps slowly increasing the force and the follower continues to match it. Then, without warning, the leader with quickly releases the force and move away from the follower. The follower is trying not to fall when the force has been removed. The leader is close enough to steady the follower so they don’t really fall. Change roles and repeat.

Another partner idea is to stand front to front again, but this time one person is holding a light object just out of their partner’s reach. The reacher is trying to lean to grab the object but the partner continues to slowly move the object just out of reach. The reacher cannot move his or her feet but can shift weight or turn without moving his or her feet. High reaching as well as below waist level reaching is good. There will be a point of reach when the reacher will lose his or her balance—that is the whole idea and the person holding the object should be able to assist their partner so no actual fall occurs. Change roles and repeat.

Postural Control

When working on postural control the key is to learn axial (skeletal) elongation as well as peripheral (arm and leg) elongation. The practice of Tadasana (Mountain pose) is difficult because of its simplicity. But learning your own postural habits is something that does affect balance and the ability to right yourself when a fall occurs.

You can address this component with a friend. Get a stick, such as a dowel, that is approximately six feet long and have your friend stand in Tadasana. Place the stick along his or her back body and see how many points of contact there are. Does the back of the head touch the stick? The upper back? The lower back? The buttocks? Do the backs of the knees touch the stick? Then look in an anatomy book to see what ideal posture is. Once you understand what your own issues are, then if you work with a yoga teacher, he or she can help you start to work on those areas that may need some attention.

Another component to address is the ability to safely lift an object off of the floor without falling forward onto your face when doing so. You can try this first with a friend and a light object like a newspaper. Each of you can do the task, which may be easier for some to do than others. Talk with each other to see if you can identify what makes it easy for some of you and more challenging for the others. With this information then you can decide if your personal issues are strength deficits, mobility or flexibility challenges, or other balance issues.

Now back to yoga poses that combine strength proprioception, and posture. Think Tree pose (Vrksasana), Mountain pose (Tadasana), Half Moon pose (Ardha Chandrasana), and Powerful pose (Utkatasana) with eyes open and closed, and with a stable and unstable surface. I am also particularly fond of the all-fours routine (Hunting Dog pose) on an unstable surface with eyes open and closed. Really you could pick one standing pose a week and work it through these variables of changing the surface you practice on, and whether you have your eyes open or closed. Moving into and out of the posture slowly or with variability in the degree of depth of the posture. The choices are endless actually.
 
Gait and Vestibular System

Try varying the speed of your walking—very fast or slow, big steps or small steps, quick changes in directions. You can also try stepping over items and around items, with quick changes again in direction after stepping over objects. Vary the objects you step over; some can be high and some can be low. You could do this with a group of friend, and have one person calling out what to do and the others following the directions. You could add music (like musical chairs) but when the music stops a pose might be called out for you to do.

And then there is what I call the “Queen Elizabeth walk” Walk at a stately pace while waving with alternating hands and turning your head to look at your adoring subject. The idea here is to make your practice fun!

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