There’s one thing I ask almost every physio client to do when I’m assessing her:
Stand on one leg.
It gives me so much information. How she transfers her weight. What her spine, hip, pelvis, knee, ankle and foot do the moment they’re asked to take on more load. And often, how that relates back to whatever’s actually brought her in.
But you know what so many women say the moment I ask them to do it?
“Oh, my balance isn’t great.” Or “I used to have really good balance.”
And I’m talking about women in their 30s, 40s and 50s.
The problem is, we’ve filed “poor balance” under OLD PERSON PROBLEMS. We picture falls, broken hips and something we’ll need to worry about decades from now.
Because right now, if we stumble, we don’t say “I had a fall.” We say “that rug tripped me,” “I wasn’t looking,” “these shoes are ridiculous.” And most of the time we recover, laugh it off and keep going.
But here’s the thing I want you to rethink this week.
Balance isn’t just whether you wobble. It’s what your body does when you wobble.
Because balance isn’t one skill. Think of it more like the control room of a live TV broadcast.
Tv control room
There are three parts to the system:
➡️ INPUT. You have multiple feeds coming in constantly. Your eyes are reporting where you are and what’s around you. Your inner ear is reporting which way is up and how your head is moving. The nerves and receptors throughout your body are reporting where your joints are, what’s underneath your feet and how your weight is shifting.
All of those live feeds get sent back to…
🔁 PROCESSING. Your control room. Your brain has to take all of that in, make sense of it, and decide what happens next, without you consciously thinking about any of it. This is also where fear lives. If you’ve had a fall before, a wobble that rattled you, a near miss, the control room gets cautious, and that shows up as stiffer, slower movement. And it’s only got so much bandwidth. Add extra cognitive load, like a conversation, a shopping list, a crowd to get through, and it’s now running two jobs instead of one.
Then comes…
⬅️ OUTPUT. Your muscles have to actually do something with all of that. Shift your weight. Correct your position. Generate enough force. Or, if necessary, take a quick step and catch you before you hit the ground. All within fractions of a second.
INPUT → PROCESS → RESPOND. That is balance.
And suddenly you can see why standing perfectly still on one leg isn’t the whole story. You might balance beautifully in your kitchen, then feel very different crossing a dark car park while looking for your keys. Or walking over uneven grass while talking to someone. Or turning quickly because one of your kids has called your name.
The task changed. The amount of information coming into the control room changed. And the response required from your body changed.
As we get older, small changes can start appearing at different points in this system.
Vision changes.
Vertigo or blood pressure changes.
Old injuries can alter the information coming from a joint.
Our cognition may change, affecting our brain processing time.
We may lose some strength and power, or our reaction speed can change.
And our lives tend to give us fewer opportunities to practise being slightly off balance, because most of the surfaces we move on are flat, stable and predictable.
None of that means you suddenly “lose your balance” at a certain age. But it does mean the system can gradually have less margin for error.
And that’s exactly why I don’t want you waiting until you’re scared of falling before you start training it. This is something worth working on while wobbling still feels completely ordinary.
So this week, I want you to start with one very simple thing.
I’ve include a standing balance test inside GLOW10 Tribe, which takes members through a few levels, each one progressively more challenging. It’s not a diagnosis, and as you now know, it can’t possibly test your entire balance control room. But it’s a really useful snapshot of how your system responds as we gradually make the job harder.
🎥 TRY THE STANDING BALANCE TEST HERE
See how far you get before it breaks you 😂.
This week’s podcast goes much further into the control room, including the link between balance and bone density and the simple ways you can challenge the different parts of the system now.
Libby 💛
P.S. This is another reason strength training really shines. It’s not just building muscle mass and maintaining or improving your bone density, so your fracture risk is lower if you do fall. It’s also directly improving your balance output, your reaction time, your coordination, and your actual chances of falling in the first place. It’s a big part of why I built strength, dynamic balance and power into my GLOW10 programs, rather than treating them as separate things.