Falls and Balance Training
Approximately one third of individuals over the age of 60 experience a fall in a given year. This can be due to the changes in the sensory, muscular, and nervous system in the healthy older populations. Fortunately, balance training has been shown to reduce your falls risk and the implementation of specific exercise programs is strongly encouraged for older Australians.
What is Balance Training?
Balance training involves challenging a person’s balance through positioning or external factors. For balance training to be effective, it must reduce the base of support, use a variety of surfaces, and challenge your centre of gravity.
Types of Falls Prevention Training
Perturbation-based balance training has been assessed as an effective method of balance training. This method aims to improve the reaction time to external forces like push/pull, and to incorporation task specific situations to postural disturbances through counter rotations and support movements.
In adjunct to balance training, physical activity reduces the risk of falling by nearly half. Strength training improves these outcomes by addressing the muscular and neural degeneration which results in muscle weakness and changes to gait. When this is performed in a supervised manner, improvements are greater than those unsupervised; however, completion of resistance training in any environment shows greater improvement than no intervention.
How much balance training is needed?
The timeframe in which balance training has been shown to have a positive effect varies in the literature. Present guidelines support 30-45 minutes of balance training completed 3 times per week. It is important to recognize the impacts of discontinued training on performance outcomes. A de-training period of 6 weeks to 3 months has been shown to decline balance improvements. Thus, a continued commitment to training is been recommended to prevent deterioration and maintain improvements. Our pilates classes at Thrive incorporate both the strengthening and balance component that is important in preventing falls.
