Episode 68 - Is Balance Training Really Training Balance?

In this episode of Three Questions, I challenge one of the biggest assumptions in movement: that standing on one leg or wobbling on an unstable surface improves your balance. The truth is, your brain is constantly integrating information from your eyes, inner ear, muscles, joints, and skin… And if you're only challenging one system, you may be getting better at an exercise instead of becoming more adaptable in real life.

In This Episode You'll Hear:

• Why sensory integration matters more than memorizing balance exercises
• How to build balance that actually transfers to everyday life
• Practical ways to integrate your visual, vestibular, and proprioceptive systems into almost any workout

Whether you're working with clients or working on yourself, I hope this episode helps you think beyond the typical balance exercises and toward building balance that actually transfers to everyday life.

Links & Resources For This Episode:
Episode 22 - Are You Balanced?
Episode 26 - Vision Check: How Your Eyes Shape Movement, Strength, and Awareness
Find a Neuro Studio Teacher Near You
Connect with me on Instagram
Connect with me on Threads

Transcript

Meghann Koppele Duffy: Welcome to Three Questions, where critical thinking is king and my opinions and research are only here to support your learning and deeper understanding. Hey, I'm your host, Meghann, and I'm so honored you clicked on Three Questions today so we can talk about balance training. And what does it actually mean to train balance?

And are we actually training balance? So a little bit different from a previous episode that I did, Are You Balanced? But I want us to think about when we're in our clinic, our studio, or working out, are we actually training our balance or are we teaching our body to be good at specific exercises and calling it progress?

Just food for thought. So let's get right into question one. Have you ever gotten really good at a specific balance exercise or any exercise in particular but didn't feel any steadier in real life? Now, a lot of times we don't realize that our balance is off until we have a problem in one of the systems.

So what I want you to think about now is maybe you're going to the gym or you're doing Pilates and you're feeling good. However, when you're walking around in a big open space or like a crowded area like Port Authority in New York, you kinda get dizzy and disoriented. Okay? This happens a lot, and this is where I want you guys to think.

What you do in the gym is not just to look good and feel good. It's that too, but you could also be adding a few components to help improve your balance and those neurological systems so that you're not dizzy and disoriented in real life. Okay? So rather than just doing specific balance exercises like standing on a BOSU or standing on one leg, what I want you to think about this with you or your clients is balance isn't one skill.

Balance is constantly coordinating input from our eyes, our inner ear, and our proprioception or our body's ability to know where the heck we are in space. And if you only practice one version of a hold, focusing just on proprioception or just focusing on a visual stimulus like a ball, you might be just memorizing that pattern and not becoming actually more adaptable.

Okay? So I just want you to think about this right now. And before I even move on, what are you doing right now to train your balance? Ask yourself that. You might be like, "Mm, well, I don't know. I mean, I'm doing Pilates, I'm weight training." Okay. Those are really challenging your proprioception via your muscles, your tendons, your joints, probably even your skin.

Now, if you're doing Pilates on a reformer, you're actually getting a vestibular challenge in many of the exercises, you might not have realized it, because the carriage is moving. If you're doing weight training, you're probably not getting a lot of vestibular challenges, unless maybe you're doing some kettle bells and really moving your head through space.

So these aren't bad things. It's not like we should stop doing Pilates or stop lifting weights. But we want to think about when I'm working one system, can I also work the other system at the same time? And that's gonna lead me to question two. So I felt like I wanted to spend the most time on question two.

I usually do that on question one, but I was just trying to mix it up tonight, okay? So my question two is, why do we only ever train one input, one sensory system at a time? So before we really answer that question, let's get all on the same page of what I mean by these three neurological systems, and I'll try to do it in plain language.

I might get a little scientific. I know my sister sometimes says she loses me on the science, but Kim, stay with me. I gotcha. Number one, what determines our balance, our ability to maintain our center of gravity over our base of support? That means keep your head, your body over your feet without falling when gravity is on us, which is all day, or any force or demand, somebody talking to us, somebody tapping us on the arm, somebody calling us, us turning, us stepping up.

Okay? So these three systems are our visual, our vestibular, and proprioception. Okay? Now, our visual system, that one actually jams people up more than they realize. Okay? And I'll use the example, if you're ever, like, standing there and, like, a bee flies by you, and it comes into your visual field, and you, like, freak the hell out, okay?

Because it kind of surprised you in your visual field. So our vision is constantly being updated, and what you see right now, guys, I know I've said this in other episodes, that's not all your visual system is taking in. It's taking a lot of, um, o- other information in and also filling blind spots. Yes, our brain does a lot of filling in the gaps with predictive patterns, shapes, and movements.

Okay? So when you are exercising, a lot of times people are looking all around, and often if you're a trainer or a teacher and you see your clients looking all around, don't tell them to look at one target. That's an indication they're trying to get more sensory input. Their brain is trying to figure out where the heck they are in space in relation to those weights.

Okay? So what I always love for people to do is look in the direction you're going. I know this sounds simple, but people don't actually do this. It makes me crazy when someone says to someone, "Keep your head up and eyes up when you're squatting." Okay, let me tell you a secret. Nobody has a visual field, especially nowadays, scrolling on our phones, our visual field up and down is way smaller than we think.

So if you're looking up and you're squatting down, keeping your eyes on that visual target, once you go out of your visual field, because as we go down, our eyes are gonna be tracking up, you're gonna tilt your head up. Now, tilting our head up is actually extending our cervical spine. Okay? Now, when we're squatting, in a perfect world, our spine will have good stability.

It might have to flex at the lumbar at that end range, depending on the depth of your squat, but we're really trying to get hip flexion, knee flexion, ankle dorsiflexion, and then the opposite on the way up. So if you're overextending your neck, it's gonna limit what you're getting at your hips, and hi, that's not what we want.

So I want you all to try something the next time you're at the gym. I want you to just stand up, rack your weights however you want. Okay? I love racking my weights in the front. And then just keep your head normal and gaze your eyes down, like casually, not like as far down as you possibly can. And then as you squat, just kind of move towards, a little diagonally towards that visual target, and then move away from it.

Move towards it and away. What you just did there is a balance exercise

You are giving your brain visual information, focusing on it. Also, by moving weight, we can get good proprioceptive information in through our joints, muscles, skin. Now, if you're a bit hypermobile or you have trouble with weight training, I want you to think of a specific pressure in your body. Now, it could be right at your hands holding the weight.

So I'm gonna talk you through it. You're, uh, you're standing up, you're holding two weight dumbbells in your hands. Okay? You're noticing how those dumbbells feel in your hands. You're gazing down, and as you move towards a visual target, you're maintaining the pressure in your hands on the way down and the way up.

"Oh, Meghann, I don't wanna think that much when you're working out." Well, then you're not doing balance training, and frankly, you're probably just reinforcing patterns that are making you feel like shit in the beginning, i- in the first place. So, like, when you're at the gym, be a little focused. We all can do two things at once.

I know we can. All right? If I can, you can. All right? So by honing in on the pressure of our hands, it's basically, um, a lot of people over-mobilize and move at their hands a lot, and it's not wrong, but we really want our shoulders to be working to support the weight, not our hands. So by maintaining the pressure in the hands, when that load changes biomechanically through the range of motion, 'cause it will, our brain and body are gonna respond to that load differently.

That's gonna shift our proprioception. So we're getting changes in proprioception, changes in visual. Okay? Now, notice I've only talked about two systems, because you only need two systems to be working to be balanced. However, if, again, you have hypermobility, lack of proprioception because of EDS, a neurological condition, maybe an injury, maybe focusing on proprioception isn't the system you should be doing.

You should be using your vestibular. So I'm gonna give you a third thing to try. First was just squatting, look down, move diagonally towards it and above it. Remember, don't drop your head. Now, number two, maintaining the pressure of your hands in the weight. Same pressure the whole range of motion. And number three, forget about the weights.

What you're gonna do is you're going to actually tilt your head back as you squat, maybe do that three times. Think you're moving the sand to the back of your head. Sorry, I want you to visualize your head is filled with sand halfway up. Sand to the back of your head three times while you're squatting or just standing still.

And then when you squat again, you're gazing at your target, and you're making sure the sand doesn't shift to the back of your head as you go down and up in the squat. So basically, we use sand as a way to tilt the head to get the, um- Excuse me, the, to get our vestibular system fired up. So we're moving the fluid in the inner ear.

Okay? And when we go straight down, we wanna keep that position of our head as we squat. So I want you to try these things, and I want you to think when you're lifting, "Hey, how can I bring my visual system, vestibular, and proprioception?" And if you're struggling with this, I've got resources for you guys.

We not only have courses to teach you how to do this at The Neuro Studio, but we also have a subscription where we teach literal weekly live classes, and there's a library of classes you can do at your own that integrates visual, vestibular, and proprioception in kind of every movement exercise in a way that you might not even know you're doing neuro.

So this doesn't have to be super heady, but it does need to be organized. And it's the same thing when people are like, "Oh, I'm not getting stronger." I'm like, "Well, are you just going to the gym and doing random shit every week?" You've gotta kind of plan. There's gotta be progressive overload in a sense that you're either doing more reps or heavier weight, organized.

If you want to get better at something, you have to practice. So if you wanna be better balanced, guys, well, we gotta train it, and we've gotta train more than one input at a time. So let's go back to that standing on one leg exercise, throwing the ball. Well, if I've got a ball, I can use a tennis ball, I could use, um, the brain speed ball that already has letters and numbers on it, but the beauty of having letters and numbers on a ball and throwing it, it's gonna help your client look at a specific spot at the ball.

Okay? So what I do is I will do different drills. I'm not just throwing the ball at my client and asking them to catch it. That's kind of, to me, a gimmicky way to say you're training balance. Are you gonna get their eyes to focus? Yeah. However, you're not gonna get what we call sensory integration. The senses are kind of counterbalancing each other, and it's gonna leave the brain to try to figure out what's going on, rather than let's train the brain to understand these different patterns so it can better predict it and give the cerebellum, a different part of your brain, better information.

So when I'm throwing it, I'm gonna throw the ball like think of a clock around a clock, and I'm gonna ask my client to turn their head and eyes to the ball. So I am using for my practitioners VOR cancellation, vestibular ocular cancellation. That's when our head and eyes move together. Okay? So I don't want them to just grab the ball.

I want them to turn their head and eyes to the ball, and I'm gonna ask them to say what direction they're turning their head. So it's right. I might even say right and up, left, down, up. Okay? So their eyes are focusing on the target, their head is moving in the same direction, and they're giving themselves an auditory cue.

Now, they are standing on one leg, so we're, we're using the visual vestibular to train the proprioception. I didn't give any proprioceptive cues there. Now, what I could do instead, if I want to not move the head, I can maybe have them not balancing on one leg- I mean, I could, I could put an ankle weight on that leg that's in the air and tell them to not let the ankle weight get closer to their standing leg, or I could have them stand on like, um, like a yoga block, like elevate one leg and give them a footprint.

So I'll say, "Maintain that footprint on the yoga block," while I'm throwing them the ball, but I don't want them to turn their head. They've got to track it with just their eyes. So instead of a BOR cancellation with head and eyes together, I'm gonna make them keep their head straight and just track their eyes in those directions.

Okay? This can be really great, and if I'm working with athletes, I'm actually going to work on peripheral vision, where I'm gonna have my athlete look to the left and try to throw the ball to the right. Now, also, if you work with any quarterbacks or any wide receivers or any ball sports, um, you know, this, soccer too, it's a little different, is you don't want to choreograph.

This is the same thing with tennis. Um, you don't want to choreograph where you're hitting the ball. I always think of Patrick Mahomes. It's like amazing, when he's a quarterback for the, um, Kansas City Chiefs- Watching him throw the ball and he sets up, he's look- is looking to the right, so you think he's gonna look for that re- hit that receiver to the right, but he's actually in his peripheral vision.

That's probably why he throws to Travis Kelce all the time. Travis Kelce's a huge target, so he could probably see Travis Kelce any place on the field. He's a huge dude. So he can train himself to look to the right, but actually throw accurately to the left. Now, if you're not working with athletes, don't freak out about that, but in the real world, we're gonna be turning our head to the left and there's gonna be things...

excuse me, left will be there, and things are gonna come to our right. So I want you to be creative with this, but don't be creative in the sense of just doing creative shit for Instagram, because that's not going to improve balance. So my practitioners, when you're working on balance, I want you to tell me specifically what part of the visual system they're working on, what eye exercise.

Are you integrating that with a vestibular-based cue or sensory input or proprioceptive? And again, if you're like, "Oh, my God, I need to learn more about this," reach out, I got you. We'll teach you how to do that. And if you know how to do that, I'm gonna challenge you to dig in a little deeper. And if you're not a practitioner listening to this, I want you to think, maybe you're in a Pilates class doing your footwork.

Maybe gaze your eyes up and move towards your target, or maybe gaze your eyes down along the ceiling and move away from it. Give your brain specific targets and things to work on. Notice your exact head position. You might see me work with clients. You'll see it on Instagram. I have a towel around their neck.

I've got the towel around their neck to give proprioceptive feedback, so what, so they don't move their head. Okay? So training balance, let's get a little deeper. I know it probably sounds complex, but I have faith in you all that you can do it. All right? And last but not least, I'd like to talk about if balance is something you have...

it's not something you have or don't have. We all have balance, right? If you weren't balanced or you didn't, weren't able to balance, you'd be falling over, you wouldn't be able to stand up. Now, this happens to people So let's not think of it as a destination. It's a continuous journey. So if you have to keep relearning this and adjusting it throughout the, a lifetime, this is what I want you to focus on.

So you can't just check balance off a box. It's a skill you have to do and renegotiate constantly. Now, if you are someone who menstruates, during your menstruation cycle, our proprioception's gonna be affected by hormones. So you're going... There's gonna be certain days where your balance feels off. Okay?

You have a choice. You can be like, "I'm not gonna work on balance training today," or, "I'm gonna be specific about s- specific movements with a visual or vestibular-based cue." You might be going through menopause, or you just started, or you went through it 10 years ago, and it's now it's starting to affect you.

Well, menopause, again, another big hormonal change combined with age. So as we age, our largest sensory organ, our skin, it doesn't get tighter. It gets looser. Okay? And that's our biggest sensory organ, giving our brain a ton of information about where we are in space. So really keeping your skin, um, hydrated and moving and elastic is really critical throughout a lifetime.

Why? Because that's a big way we can get proprioception. Your tendons and your muscles are gonna change, so you can't exercise the same way in menopause that you did before. But it doesn't have to change drastically. You're gonna have to tune in and recalibrate your body's proprioception. It's changing, and you saying you're, it's not, it's just- I don't mean to like...

You're wrong. It is. It happens to everybody. It happens to men and women. That doesn't mean you're not as strong. It doesn't mean you're not as fit. But we've got to deal with those changes because as your skin and muscles and tendons age, you won't feel the stretch, the shift, the pressure as soon as you did when you were younger.

So there's a delay in how you respond to proprioceptive information. It's why a lot of people get injured, right? They'll be like, "Oh my God, I, I didn't feel that right away," and then damn. Yeah. If you've got EDS or hypermobility, man, proprioceptive cues to me is not the entry point into change for you.

Because what happens is when your foot touches the ground, it's not gonna respond to the pressure until it's really almost pushed into the ground too much. So working on light pressure against the floor, this is critical for everybody at every age. Think about the machines, what the feedback it's getting from your hands.

So I'm gonna give you a little bit of a tip to try the next time you're working out. The next time you grab something, kind of grab it and just, maybe it's a weight, lift it off the ground. It could be a coffee cup. It could be a water bottle. I want you to notice how the pressure changes in your hand.

Just notice. Does it go to your thumb? Does the pressure increase in your whole hand? Then I want you to lift that same thing again without increasing the pressure in your hand. Now, keep in mind, when you reach down, you kinda have to grab the thing, right? So don't feel like you can't hold something, and clients always do this.

I'm gonna hold my flying pig. See you when pigs fly. So people, I'll say, "Okay, grab it again without increasing the pressure." And people do this like half grip nonsense. I go, "Ah, ah, ah, ah." No. Hold it, squeeze it without increasing the pressure at the same place. And people look at me like I'm crazy. I'm like, "Just do it."

It's honestly what I do when I'm playing tennis, especially in the heat, because my arm, my proprioception, I'm terrible in the heat and humidity, um, especially playing tennis outside. So I have to always, between each point, I'll squeeze my racket and try to not increase the pressure between my hand and my racket, 'cause then that activates my shoulder.

It helps my proprioception, gets me back online so I'm not dragging butt on the tennis court, okay? So I want you to try this. I want you to move your body. Do a squat. Do a sit-up. Do something and be like, "Huh, where did the pressure increase in my body when I did that? I don't know." Then move on. But if you felt, "Oh, I really felt the pressure increase in my right foot, let me see if I can do it again without increasing the pressure there."

Okay? Now, don't come at to me with physics. I love people who, um, a woman who, like, had this debate with me, and I asked her, I'm like, "Oh, have you ever taken physics?" And she's like, "No." So I was like, "Oh, okay, never mind then." But it's not that it's wrong for the pressure to increase in your hands or your feet, but often where the pressure increases, where we feel the floor or the weight more, is the joints that are kind of our primary movers, our more efficient movement patterns, where we're moving the most.

But we have so many joints and other options, and there's a lot of little joints in the hand, right? So I'd rather the most mobile joint in your body, your shoulder, really carry the bulk of that load, okay? This is why you ever do fireman's carries and your hands and wrists are, like, dead. Yeah, you gotta work on grip strength, but grip strength doesn't just mean squeezing shit.

Grip strength is squeezing the shit out of something with the pressure not increasing in one spot. It'll kind of sh- go through your entire body and really get your shoulders to activate, okay? So try this. Be curious. That's how we're really going to change our proprioception. So what if we thought of balance training is helping our brain adapt to know where our body is in space at all times, and organizing that shift, those changes, with our visual and vestibular system.

We can also train our body to do things in opposition, right? So I might train my body to laterally flex to the right but tilt my head to the left. So try to do that. Laterally flex, so, like, go up and over to the right, but tilt your head to the left. And do that at the same time. It's kind of confusing, isn't it?

Okay? But you're training your brain to do that, and bonus points if you look at one visual target when you do it.

Then maybe now look at the same visual target and move your head and body in the same direction. And what you might notice is, whoa, I've got so much more range of motion in that direction. Sorry, I moved away from the mic. Sorry if the sound got louder or softer. Nobody needs my voice any louder than it already is.

Okay? So don't think that our body, our visual vestibular and proprioception always have to go in the same direction. However, I want your brain to be conscious and know when it's going in opposite directions, and I'm gonna leave you with this. Many people when they're doing sit to stands, okay, that's standing up, sitting down, a lot of clients as they get older, they have neurological conditions, can't get up, and they're like, "Oh, it's weakness."

No, it's not. Watch your client. If they are having trouble or you're having trouble getting out of a chair, I guarantee you are... You're supposed to shift forward when you s- stand up. Nobody like comes up straight out of a chair like that, that's just not how anybody stands up. You hinge your body forward, and then you stand up.

What most people do is they hinge forward, and then they tilt their head back when they hinge forward. Okay? So their vestibular system's telling them they're going backwards, but visual and proprioception are telling them they're going forwards. They have no idea they're doing their head backwards. No clue.

So that's why I'll tell my client, I'll put a towel around their neck, I'll give them a visual target just down, and I'll just say, "Move towards and away that, from that visual target, then move towards it and stand above it." If they keep tilting their head back, which happens a lot, they have gone out of their visual field.

So I could also do the opposite, teach them to lean forward and bring their head back. Lean forward and bring the head back. Lean forward. Now stand up without tilting your head back. I actually did this with my dad yesterday. When he stands up, he almost goes too far back, and he loses his balance, so I taught him how to tilt his head back and then stand up without tilting his head back.

And he goes, "Oh, well, that felt better." I go, "Yeah." His brain proprioceptively did not realize he was leaning back too far when he stood up. Why is that? Well, unfortunately, he has bad neuropathy from his feet from chemotherapy, and he is 74. Also, from chemo and having cancer, he's lost a large amount of muscle mass, and don't tell my dad that I told you, but he didn't have a lot of muscle mass to begin with.

So proprioceptively, his body is really struggling. Okay? So to close this all up, I wanna return to our three questions. When you're working out, when you're thinking about your body, are you training yourself to be really good at this one balance exercise? Let's focus on how we can, at the gym, be steadier in life.

And how can we do that? Well, focusing on question two, not just training one input at a time, not just be focusing on proprioception. And I got a little secret. Your proprioception is not very reliable. I know. It's annoying. Neither is mine. I pay one of my friends to literally watch me work out once a week.

He's my f- he's my eyes on my proprioception. Today, oh my God, it was freaking nuts. I'm working on, um, doing some different variety in pushups just to build some strength, and he's like, "Yo, why are your feet to the left?" I'm like, "No. How far do they have to go to the right?" He's like, "Keep going. Keep going." I was like, "Shut up."

He's like, "No, keep going." I was like, "For real?" He's like, "Yeah." And I believed him. I'm right in front of him on camera. My proprioception was telling me that my feet were, like, in Guam, they were so far to the right. And he's like... I'm like, "Do me a favor. Take a picture for me." Took a picture, and I'm like, "Damn it."

Because my proprioception told me my current pattern felt straight to me, which was shifting both my feet to the left in a plank Because I do it all the time. So when Justin actually, shout out to Justin, when Justin actually got my feet in better alignment, it felt interesting to my brain, but it felt so crooked, so crooked.

But I trusted him. I know that my proprioception was a problem because in my pushup I was losing weakness. After like the fifth rep, I was arching my back a little bit. I was losing my hips. I was losing my hips because my feet were not helping. When we got my feet into alignment, oh my God, the connection from my feet to my butt was like, I felt like I could do 100 pushups.

I was like, "Damn it." And I then said, "Okay, I'm gonna get into that alignment again." And I go, "How am I doing?" He's like, "You still gotta go to the right." I said, "Okay." So I'm actually not gonna do pushups again until I see him next week. Why? Because I cannot trust my proprioception. I need his eyes on me in this position.

So please don't think I am critiquing your movement patterns. I'm just saying if you wanna get stronger, if you wanna have better balance, that means we shouldn't reinforce your pr- proprioception, we should change it. And my practitioners, this is why every time you straighten a client, they go, "This ain't straight."

And you're like, "What do you think I'm trying to jam you up here?" It doesn't feel straight to them because their proprioception is telling them it's wrong. And you're like, "Yo, this is right. You're doing the exercise so much better." But their proprioception, so we've gotta explain to people, let's not go by feel.

I'm gonna take a picture or use a mirror. Let's stay in alignment based off this wall and that and just do it. We've gotta change their proprioception. Cool? And as they're aging, as they're changing, in, if you work with female young athletes, this needs to be addressed. Also, um, athletes, male athletes or athletes who are having a lot of testosterone, their muscles and bodies are changing.

They might have big growth spurts. Gr- um, girls have this as well too, but we've got to be conscious of those changes throughout a lifetime. Teaching a kid a specific proprioceptive cue, they're gonna continually do that even when they don't need it. This is why I love leading with my athletes, and my athletes, um, older, sorry, I didn't wanna like call people old, is visual and vestibular.

Okay? Because they can't think what they feel is gospel. All right? So I hope you are... I, I maybe hope you are a little overwhelmed after this episode of being like, "Oh, I don't know if I'm doing enough for my balance in the gym I want you to think about that. I want you to reach out. I am here to fully support you on this.

Also, if you're looking for classes who do this that, like, just kind of weave it in, we've got those at the Neuro Studio. We've got a subscription. You can cancel it at any time. If you hate the classes, bye-bye. Totally fine. But it's a way for you to experience this in your body because just training to be good at the gym is not going to help us in our real life.

We need to be good at responding no matter where we are. So thanks, guys, and I look forward to exploring more questions with you in the next episode