Research has shown many times that the strength of your leg muscles greatly influences the quality of your balance and therefore your ability to prevent falls.
In general, as people age, they use their leg muscles less, allowing those muscles to become smaller and weaker. This process is very slow and occurs over many years. Most people won’t notice until one day they have trouble getting off the couch or going up the stairs.
To slow or prevent this crucial loss of muscle mass, it’s important for people over the age of 60 to engage in regular leg-strengthening exercises. This is a broad subject, but in this article I would like to focus on the findings of a study recently published in Geriatrics and Gerontology International (March 2009).
The study, conducted at the University of Porto in Portugal and led by Fernando Ribeiro, showed that strength training two key muscle groups in the lower leg helped participants perform better on two balance tests.
The muscles that focused on strengthening were the calves, located on the back of the lower leg just below the knee, and the dorsiflexors, located on the front of the lower leg just below the knee. knee.
These two muscle groups work together to control your foot when you are standing or walking. Riberio’s exercise protocol simply had participants strengthen these two muscle groups 3 times a week for five minutes during the 6-week study.
In the study, they used elastic bands for the exercises, but I’ll show you how to strengthen the same muscles without any equipment. You will do two exercises:
Exercise 1 – Points of the feet
Sit on the edge of a chair sitting flat with your knees bent at 90 degrees. Extend the knee of one leg so that one foot lifts off the ground and moves slightly forward. Point your toe forward. This is your starting point.
From there, keeping the leg in place and moving only the ankle joint, pull the toes in towards the shins. Then point your toes forward again. Do 10 to 15 repetitions, then switch to the other leg.
As you pull your toes back, you should feel the muscles at the top of your shin, just below the knee, contract.
Exercise 2 – Calf Raises
Stand in front of your sink with both feet pointed forward. Your feet should be about 6 inches from each other and 6 inches from the sink. Hold on to the sink and counter for balance and rise up on your toes. Both heels should be off the ground a couple of inches. Go down slowly. Do 10-15 repetitions.
As you rise on your toes, you should feel the muscles in the back of your lower leg contract.
You can do 1-2 sets of each exercise 2-3 times a week, but not two days in a row.
These two exercises will help strengthen your lower legs and that should help your balance, but remember that these exercises are only one piece of the puzzle. If you want to do all you can to improve your balance, you should follow an organized program of balance exercises and leg-strengthening exercises.
