Be it physical or mental, the key to a healthy life is balance. A Balance board is a fitness tool that can help you improve your strength, balance, and coordination. The most interesting part is that a balance board benefits your entire body, and using it doesn’t feel like work. It is a fun and entertaining piece of fitness equipment that is portable and doesn’t take up a lot of space.
Balance Board Benefits for your Entire Body
A well-designed balance board will be challenging at first but should allow you to notice significant improvements as your balance progresses. To achieve the maximum balance board benefits, it is important to concentrate on keeping the board level. Your body will stay in continuous motion, and you will have to work on balancing your body with micro movements, thus developing your fine motor skills.
It is important for engaging your proprioception sense, the sense that allows you to know where your body is in space with your eyes closed. An article from Northwestern University explains that your brain receives signals from all your muscle spindles, along with other sensory receptors in your tendons and joints, and constructs an overall sense of the position and motion of your body. This sensory information is the foundation for building skills applicable to not only sports and athletics but also for everyday life.
Developing your Core Muscles:
Balance boards are designed to start working the hidden core muscles you have been neglecting or maybe forgotten about the minute you step on your board and begin balancing. Some of our major core muscles are:
- Abdominal muscles
- Lower back muscles
- Lats (the ones that give your upper body that “V” shape
- Internal and External Obliques (these run from your ribs down to your hips)
- Abductors and adductors (the muscles that run on the inside and outside of your thighs)
- Glutes (your butt)
Our abdominal muscles are made up of a number of muscles that overlap each other. They are extended from the base of our neck to all the way down our legs. Their main function is to support our torso and keep the spine upright. When these muscles are weak they can lead to chronic lower back pain. Balance board training helps you develop these core muscles quicker and more efficiently. If you are finding yourself waking up with lower back pain, it is probably a good time to start working these core muscles.
Improving your Agility:
Agility is something everyone can benefit from. The ability to switch from one position to another, quickly, is a fundamental skill that benefits professional athletes or the clumsiest person walking down the street an uneven sidewalk. Training will allow you to instantly switch from offense to defense, or help you catch yourself if you trip! Whether you are a football player, snowboarder, or labeled the office klutz, moving quickly on any surface in any direction is important for a healthy balanced body. A balance board will help you achieve increased agility effectively while also preventing injuries.
Strengthening & Rehabilitating your Ankle and Knee Joints:
Every athlete, particularly runners, are aware of the risk factors that are involved when they participate in sports. To become a great runner, you must know how to prevent injury and recover from it effectively. Dr. Michael Fredericson from Stanford University understands the importance of a well-developed core musculature. He claims that weakness or lack of sufficient coordination in core musculature can lead to less efficient movements, compensatory movement patterns, strain, overuse, and injury. Using a balance board to improve and strengthen muscles before running will result in less ankle and knee injuries, also making rehabilitation time shorter. Some literature supports using neuromuscular training to prevent ACL injuries in athletes. These programs include muscle co-contraction to provide joint stability, balance and perturbation training, and plyometric exercises. This can also be extremely beneficial to wakeboarders who are prone to these types of knee injuries.
Creating Better Posture:
Anywhere you look today, you may find poor posture. There are the people commuting long distances on a train, the truck drivers who drive across the country remaining sedentary, or the office 9-5er who is hunching over his desk and keyboard all day. These types of occupations are causing the constant rounding on our backs and keeping our shoulders hunched from weak skeletal muscles. There is good news, with a balance board you can develop good posture and fight back against your spine slumping and curving. Balance boards help by strengthening the deep muscles in our torso that don’t normally get worked out. This eventually provides us with a strong foundation and a better taller sexy posture.
Working New Muscle Groups:
While training with a balance board, our small and large muscles are going to have to work together to keep ourselves stable. This will help provide you with an overall body workout. It’s a much more intense workout than you would get from lifting weights or running alone. If you want an added challenge then try doing a push-up with your hands on a balance board. The result will be phenomenal!
Strengthening your Mind:
The most exciting benefit is that these boards don’t just work out our physical bodies, but strengthens our minds. In order to continue balancing on the board, you have to concentrate and react fast. Doing this over and over again improves the way your mind responds to tasks. With time you will also find yourself reacting to physical challenges much more quickly.
Balance Board Benefits for Anyone and Everyone:
Needless to say, balance board benefits will provide anyone with an overall toned, fit and healthy body. Whether you are a gymnast on the beam, or a basketball player trying to make three-pointers, balance boards will help you control your body’s stability. This will put you in an advantageous position over your competition or just help you lead a happy healthy life.
So what else would you like to know about this unique fitness tool? Please share your feedback in the comments section and I will be addressing them in the upcoming posts. Also, if you found this post helpful then feel free to like and share it with your social peers. Keep following this space for more related writings.