Posted by Eric Brown

Hold your balance and stay fit

How many people do you ever see in the gym practising standing on one leg? The yoga crowd like to show off their static postures, and everyone these days does a few ab crunches on a Swiss ball in deference to core stability, but it rarely occurs to us to add balance training to our programmes.

Aussie triathlon team physio Mark Alexander has some revealing insights in this month’s SIB about the importance of “proprioception”. It can, he says, be the overlooked answer when athletes develop otherwise inexplicable over-use injuries such as shin splints, plantar fasciitis, stress fractures or ITB syndrome.

What is proprioception? In essence, it describes the awareness we all take for granted of how our bodies behave in space; specifically about our “joint position sense”. Nerve endings in our muscles and tendons are constantly sending and receiving signals to and from the brain that govern very precisely how, how far and when we activate muscles to help us move – or remain still.

Sports therapists have known for a long time that if you break or sprain an ankle, for instance, you have to heal and rehabilitate not just the affected soft tissues, but also the proprioceptors, to teach yourself anew how to balance properly.

But many of us, after a knee or ankle sprain, just rest up a while and then carry on as before. We are, Mark Alexander believes, storing up trouble, because the invisible reduced performance of our proprioceptors will start to produce other biomechanical distortions, and before you know it, over-use injuries.

“If an individual can’t stand on one foot at rest without excessive ankle and leg sway, then they are clearly going to experience too much uncontrolled foot and ankle movement while running, when the foot strikes the ground,” Mark writes. “This can lead to overactive shin muscles, such as within tibialis posterior, which can cause excessive pulling of the muscle and lead to shin symptoms.”

The message is this: if you suffer from any of the classic lower-limb over-use injuries, and are perplexed as to why, ask your sports therapist whether impaired proprioception might be contributing.

And if you have ever had an ankle or knee injury, check out how good your balance is on the affected side, compared to the other leg. If there’s any noticeable difference, do some proprioception rehab now, rather than wait for chronic injury to set in. Single leg stands are a good starting point, followed by single leg squats and/or wobble-board work.

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