Corporate Fitness and Active Aging

We hear a lot about stability, but how do you accurately incorporate it into a client’s program? Understanding how to incorporate stability training will help keep your clients functional, independent, and healthy regardless of age.

Here are five ways to incorporate stability training.

1. Functional balance. Think advanced balance exercises that are performed with slight movement. Because functional balance is directly correlated to everyday life, performing these types of exercises can be an eye-opener for clients, highlighting their ability to balance. Functional balance can look like marching on foam pads, lunging forward and twisting your upper body, or lightly tapping your foot on top of a cone.
2. Strength. Having muscular strength is good, but can your clients perform exercises like the single-leg Romanian Deadlift and control their shoulders or hips so that they don’t rotate? Strength directly correlates to better balance, and putting the body in positions where the torso needs to stabilize enhances training.
3. Reaction. Every day we react to either verbal or visual stimulus. Why not train it? Training reaction can look like having clients partner up and do mirrored exercises like tandem walk, lateral shuffle, or even marching forward and back or left and right, while mirroring your (or a partner’s) movements. Another fun twist on reaction training with a larger group is to form a large circle and start marching in place. The leader tells the group which way to march and sees how some individuals respond quickly to the command while others have to think about it.
4. Coordination and agility. Training the limbs to move in sync with one another is a challenge. Exercises with an agility ladder provide multiple opportunities to see the exercises demonstrated and make your body do what it just saw. Want to add more of a challenge? Try asking your clients to keep their heads up—and not keep their eyes down on their feet.
5. Central nervous system. Combining the training approaches above either allows for new pathways to be formed in the CNS, or uses old pathways that have not been used recently. We all know the benefit of creating pathways throughout the CNS, but how do we train for this? Envision a difficult exercise, one for which you know what the body needs to do but successfully doing it is another story. Incorporate exercises that require one part of the body to do something separate from the other, for example one of my favorite exercises is Quick Feet, Slow Arms: the feet are going rapid fire, but the slower the arms move, the better.

The fun in training stability is seeing different peoples’ thought processes. What is easy to one person can be hard to someone else, yet for the next exercise it could be vice versa. Our clients enjoy stability training because it’s unlike any class they have experienced, provides a new learning opportunity, and keeps them on their toes.

What are some of your favorite ways to train stability? Click below for more information on how to maximize balance training for your residents. 

Tell me if this has ever happened to you: You are fast asleep in your warm, comfy bed. In the middle of that perfect sleep, you suddenly hear the telephone ringing. So you open your eyes, sit up, and slide your feet into your slippers. At this point, you are in a rush because you are now thinking that it could be an emergency. You take a few steps as quickly as you can to get to the phone, which happens to be all the way across the room. Suddenly, the front of your slipper nicks the carpet and you feel yourself going down and fast.

You reach for something to grab but find nothing to get ahold of, so you throw out your hands to try to stop yourself from hitting the floor too hard. Now you’re lying on the carpet in pain because your hands and arms hurt as well as anywhere else you may have hit your body on the way down.

Why Does the Carpet Hate You?

You then remember how the carpet used to be your friend at a very young age. You recall how you used to love the carpet so deeply that you would fall asleep on it at times. As you got older, the friendship seemed to fizzle out. Over the last few years, it seems as though your old friend has it out for you because every time you come across it, it takes you down—and down hard!

Fear not. There could be a much simpler solution to this problem than avoiding all carpet everywhere. Maybe the problem has more to do with your ankle mobility.

Ankle Mobility Exercises

Following are a few examples of exercises that you can do to improve your ankle mobility.

• Seated heel raises: Sit at the edge of a chair and place both feet on the ground with both knees at a 90-degree angle. While keeping your toes on the ground, raise your heels up for a count of 2 and down for a count of 2. Try doing 2 sets of 20 repetitions with both feet. You can challenge yourself by holding a weight or a heavy book on your knees for added resistance.
• Seated toe raises: Sit at the edge of a chair and place both feet on the ground with both knees at a 90-degree angle. While your heels stay on the ground, raise your toes up for a count of 2 and down for a count of 2. Try doing 2 sets of 20 repetitions with both feet.
• Seated ankle stretches: Sitting on a chair, raise one leg so that your foot is no longer in contact with the ground. Point your toes up and down. Try to do this stretch without kicking your leg up and down. Try doing 2 sets of 30 seconds with both feet.
• Seated ankle circles: Sitting in a chair, raise one leg, lifting the foot from the ground. While your leg is raised, move your foot around in circles. Try to do it without moving the entire leg. You really want to focus on only moving the foot. Try doing 2 sets of 30 seconds in both directions with both feet.

Moving Forward

Click here to get more information and images of exercises that you can do to improve your foot or ankle mobility. And click here to learn a little more about mobility and stability.

Let us know how your next encounter with that dreadful carpet went by commenting below.

NIFS Fitness Management's programming can also help residents improve their balance with regular exercise.  Check out how Balance Redefined is changing residents lives!