Balance

Balance is very important in all of the things you do each day. Balance is important in routine tasks like climbing on a chair and reaching into a cupboard to grab something from the top shelf, and in more specialized skills like a gymnast staying on the balance beam while doing a handstand. For most of us balance is something that we are just able to do; but balance can change with age, injury, and illness. Maybe you have a grandparent who has fallen. A lot of these falls in older adults are caused by a balance problem. For example if you are diabetic, you may lose feeling in your feet and when you lose the ability to sense the ground, called proprioception, often you have exhibit poor balance. Balance can change due to injury too, like when you tear the anterior-cruciate ligament in your knee, a common injury for soccer and football players. When you don’t have the support provided by your ligament you may wobble more, creating more sway in your posture, and making it more difficult to balance.

The good news is that injuries can be prevented and balance problems can be overcome! Sports training can help prevent injuries before they begin. Strengthening muscles, doing balance exercises, and learning the best way to perform sport skills like jumping and cutting are all ways to prevent injuries. In athletes who are competing at very high-levels of sport, like on a collegiate or professional team, their coaches and trainers may even have them go through a full biomechanical evaluation to quantify and understand how the player runs and moves, so that training can be geared to change any behaviors which might be likely to lead to injury. Once an injury occurs, many individuals will go to a physical therapist to work on regaining strength and ability so that they can return to competing. Exercising the muscles and working to improve balance by standing on a wobble board or other device may be ways to get back to pre-injury levels.

The Biomechanical Engineering and Sports Injury Prevention and Recovery presentation for the COSI Experts Electronic Education program will address all of these things further. In the meantime, the questions below will give you a bit better feel and understanding for the work we are doing on balance here at Bertec Corporation.