Balance Training Exercises: Valuable for All Ages 

Balance training exercises are important for all ages and fitness levels, whether you’re an athlete trying to improve performance, an individual trying to recover from an injury, or a senior trying to maintain mobility, stability, and prevent falls.¹ Incorporating balance exercises into your routine can be beneficial at any age and fitness level.

Developing Good Balance

Balance is the ability to maintain the body’s center of mass over its base of support.² Balance isn’t just a physical characteristic. It’s a complex sensorimotor process² that depends on the coordination of your brain, nervous system, and musculoskeletal system.³

Developing good balance requires:

1. Proprioception: The body’s awareness of its position in space as well as the ability to sense where parts of the body are relative to each other.
2. Vestibular system: The bodily system that includes the sensory organs in your inner ear which help you detect head movements.^4,5 (Problems with the vestibular system can cause dizziness, vertigo, and imbalance.)⁵
3. Visual cues: These signals use your vision to detect objects around you.⁴ That’s why clear vision is an integral part of keeping your balance.

Balance and stability differ from strength, power, and endurance in that the focus is on maintaining control of your body while in motion, rather than producing more force or speed.⁴ Improving strength, power, and endurance is beneficial, but if I lose my footing while walking or running downhill, the cause is typically insufficient balance rather than insufficient strength, power, or endurance.⁴

Balance Recommendations

While balance training is often recommended for older adults to help maintain good mobility and reduce falls,^6,7 it is also used to improve sports-related skills and to prevent and rehabilitate injuries.^8,9 Accordingly, balance training can be useful for young and old alike. In fact, when comparing a large review of balance training studies in healthy older adults (aged ≥ 65) with recent findings in healthy young adults (aged 16-40), the effective training protocols were remarkably similar.^9,10 Based on these reviews, protocols for effective balance training (BT) were characterized by:

• 11-12 weeks BT for healthy adults of all ages.
• 3 BT sessions per week for healthy adults of all ages.
• At least 16-19 BT sessions for healthy young adults; a total of 36-40 BT sessions for healthy older adults.
• Single BT sessions lasting 11-15 minutes in duration for healthy young adults; single BT sessions lasting 31-45 minutes in duration (with a total of 90-120 minutes per week) for healthy older adults.^9,10

Although the review of studies in healthy older adults could not determine the most effective number of exercises, sets, repetitions, or exercise duration, the study of healthy young adults did. Its analysis found that an effective balance training protocol for young adults included:

• 4 balance training exercises per session
• 2 sets per exercise
• Exercises held for 21–40 seconds.⁹

Following this type of routine helped improve measures of steady, controlled balance.⁹

Note: A systematic review among athletes suggested an efficient training protocol of 8 weeks of balance training, 2 sessions per week, 45 minutes per session So, this is something to consider if you are an athlete looking to improve balance and postural control in your specific sport.⁸

A Starting Point

Considering this research, a good starting point may be to incorporate the following:

• 2-3 balance training sessions per week
• 15-45 minutes in duration
• Start with 2 sets of 4 exercises, working your way up to holding positions for 40 seconds (when appropriate). Add more challenging balance training exercises as you are able.
• Continue balance training as an ongoing part of your routine; research shows that noticeable gains often appear after 8–12 weeks (2–3 months),^8,9,10 but this will vary by individual.

Ready to start balance training?

If you’re ready to start balance training exercises, see 15 Exercises to Improve Your Balance and get started today.