Maintaining balance on one leg can be surprisingly challenging as we age, but training to do it for longer can strengthen your muscles, improve your memory and keep your brain healthier.
Unless you’re a flamingo, spending time delicately balanced on one leg isn’t something you’re likely to invest a lot of time into. And depending on your age, you may find this surprisingly difficult.
Balancing on one leg usually doesn’t require much effort when we are young. Normally, our ability to maintain this posture matures around the age of nine or ten. Our balance reaches its peak in the late 30sbefore starting to decay.
If you are over 50, your ability to balance on one leg for more than a few seconds may be aging.
But there are also good reasons to want to spend more time balancing on one leg – this can bring a range of benefits to your body and brain, such as help reduce the risk of fallsstrengthen muscles and improve memory. This seemingly simple exercise can have a huge impact on your health as you age.
“If you find it difficult, it’s time to start training your balance,” says Tracy Espiritu McKay, a rehabilitation medicine specialist at the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. (More on how to incorporate single-leg balance training into your daily routine later in this article.)
Why worry about your balance?
One of the main reasons doctors use one-leg balance as an indicator of health is its relationship to progressive loss of muscle tissue age-related, or sarcopenia.
From the age of 30, we lose muscle mass at a rate of up to 8% per decade. Some research suggests that by the time we reach age 80, up to 50% of people have clinical sarcopenia.
This condition is linked to several factors, from inadequate blood glucose control to decreased immunity against diseases, but, as it affects the strength of several muscle groups, it is also reflected in the ability to maintain balance on one leg. At the same time, people who practice single-leg balance exercises have less likely to develop sarcopenia in old age, as this simple exercise helps keep the leg and hip muscles in shape.
“The ability to stand on one leg decreases [com a idade],” says Kenton Kaufman, director of the movement analysis laboratory at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. “People begin to feel this decrease around age 50 or 60, and it increases considerably with each subsequent decade of life.”
There is also another, more subtle reason that makes our ability to maintain balance on one leg important: its connection to the brain.
This seemingly simple posture requires not only muscular strength and flexibility, but also the brain’s ability to integrate information from the eyesthe balance center in the inner ear, known as the vestibular system, and the somatosensory system, a complex network of nerves that helps us perceive both the position of our body and the ground beneath our feet.
This means that your ability to stand on one leg can reveal a lot about the state of important brain regions, explains Espiritu McKay. This includes the regions involved in reaction speedin the ability to perform daily tasks and in the speed with which you can integrate information from your sensory systems.
Frighteningly, your ability to stand on one leg even reflects your risk of premature death in the short term. A 2022 study found that people unable to stand on one leg for 10 seconds in middle or old age had 84% more likely to die for any cause within the next seven years.
According to Espiritu McKay, this same pattern can be observed even in people diagnosed with dementia – those who can still balance on one leg show a slower decline. “In Alzheimer’s patients, researchers are finding that if they can’t stand on one leg for five seconds, that generally predicts more rapid cognitive decline,” she says.
Train your balance
The good news is that research increasingly shows that we can do a lot to reduce the risks of these age-related problems by actively practicing single-leg balancing. These exercises – which scientists call “single leg balance training” – can not only strengthen core, hip and leg muscles, but also brain health. “Our brains are not fixed,” says Espiritu McKay. “They are quite malleable. These single-leg balance exercises really improve balance control and alter brain structure, especially in regions involved in sensorimotor integration and spatial perception.”
Balancing on one leg can also boost cognitive performance when performing tasks, activating the prefrontal cortex. One study showed that this can even improve working memory in healthy young adults.
Espiritu McKay recommends that people over 65 start doing single leg balance exercisesat least three times a week, to improve mobility and reduce the risk of future falls. The ideal, however, is to incorporate these exercises into your daily routine.
There may be even greater benefits to starting this type of training earlier in life.
Claudio Gil Araújo, an exercise medicine researcher at the Clinimex clinic in Rio de Janeiro, who led the 2022 study on the relationship between standing on one leg and the risk of premature death, suggests that all people over 50 do a self-assessment of your ability of standing on one leg for 10 seconds.
“This can be easily incorporated into your daily activities,” he says. “You can stand on one leg for 10 seconds and then switch to the other while brushing your teeth. I also recommend that you do it barefoot and with shoes on, because the sensation is a little different.”
This is because wearing shoes provides different levels of stability compared to being barefoot.
Daily activities like standing at the sink while washing dishes or brushing your teeth are also great opportunities to train your ability to stand on one leg, researchers say. Try to minimize body swaying for as long as possible. You can get results with just 10 minutes a day practicing balance.
Os gentle hip strengthening exercises with light resistance – also known as isokinetic exercises – can also help improve balance on one leg.
