Instantly Improve Balance with 1 Simple Trick (Ages 50+)

I'm often able to instantly improve my patient balance with one simple trick and in today's video I'm going to show you what that trick is and how you can do it at home if you don't know who I am my name is will harow and I'm the over 50s specialist physio here at HD physio INF farum and today I'm going to be revealing one simple trick that you can use to improve your balance now balance problems are incredibly common many people suffer from them and they can be catastrophic they can lead to people people losing their confidence when they're on their feet they can lead to fear of falling and what's worse is they can lead to actual Falls and major injuries as well so improving balance is one of my biggest goals with my clinic and with this channel now there is one major problem that leads to many balance issues for many people all over the world and to illustrate what that is I'm going to show you two pictures in the corner of the screen so in the first picture what we seeing here is the outline of feet when they're standing on the ground and this is a picture of what a normal foot should look like we've got the heel we've got the midfoot we've got the ball of the foot and most importantly we've got the toes all making contact with the ground when a person stands now it might surprise you to learn but that picture is actually quite rare often we see pictures of people's feet when we do scans on their feet that look nothing like that and a really common one is this one so this is something we see very commonly and you can see that this person has still got their heels on the floor they've still got the midfoot and the ball of the foot but they're missing the toes their toes are not making contact with the floor when they stand and the problem with that is if you are standing like this and your toes are retracted even if they look like they're flat they're not making contact with the floor which means you've lost about 20% of the surface area of your foot on the floor and that means your balance is probably reduced by about that same amount so if you lose 20% of your balance that could be the difference between falling and not falling so making sure that our toes are making contact with the ground is vital and that's applicable for when we walk and when we stand so in today's video I'm going to show you how to ensure your toes are making contact with the floor when you're standing and I'm going to give you two exercises to help you do it and these exercises have rapid effects on many people who aren't making contact with the floor with their toes and hopefully it'll be the same for you just to let you know before I show you these exercises they are not suitable for everyone make sure you get checked out by your doctor first and don't do them if they cause you any pain let's have a look at the exercises now so to illustrate my point to you here when people have got retracted toes their toes are not fully in contact with the ground they've lost 20% of their contact with with the ground here and if you ever feel like you're about to lose balance when you go from one foot to the other when you're walking this could be your problem now the easiest way to check is to look down and see what your toes are doing so in an Ideal World when you look down at your toes they should look like this so you should see an image there right now it shows you what my toes at the moment are looking like when they're fully in contact with the floor now many people instead of looking like that their toes look like this which is where their toes are retracted they're not quite fully in contact with the floor which means that they're missing out on that 20% of extra balancing ability but if that's you don't worry I'm going to show you exactly how to regain contact with your toes on the floor with two very easy exercises that could work right away so the first exercise that's going to help you fix this problem is called towel scrunches and this is one of my favorite exercises to reconnect my patients with their Fe feet now that might sound like a funny thing to say but throughout the course of life especially if we're wearing Ultra supportive or tight fitting shoes we lose connection to the muscles in our feet and that means that our toes tend to retract and when we try and use the muscles that spread them out we can't do it anymore so this exercise will help you to reconnect to them so all you need for this is a towel and you're going to sit in a chair with your feet resting on the towel like this and you might find that your toes are a little bit attracted already so you can't fully get your whole toes on top of the towel yet but don't worry we're going to work on that movement so all this exercise is it's very simply you're going to extend your toes out as if they're fingers and you're going to try and grab the towel and Pull It in towards you so again we spread the toes out as if they're fingers grab the towel and pull it towards you so you can see here I've got my heels on the carpet and I've got my toes on the towel and I don't know if you can see this I'll show you an up close in a moment you can start to see I'm dragging that towel closer towards me so even though it feels like what I'm doing is retracting the toes further it's this part here where you extend the toes and then grab which is where you get the biggest bang for your buck so I'm extending and then grabbing and dragging that towel in and it doesn't take long before you start to feel those intrinsic foot muscles starting to get quite tired the reason for that is is not used to doing this kind of thing but once they become used to it you'll be able to grab the ground if that makes sense when you're standing your toes will be in better contact with it and you'll have a better purchase on your shoe or on the floor as well so I would recommend doing that exercise for a couple of minutes a day if you're one of the many people who doesn't have great balance and that's going to improve your connection with the floor and stop you from losing your balance and then the second exercise we're going to do here is the toe extensor stretch so your toe extensors are the muscles or the tendons that live on top of the foot and if they become tight they start to pull the toes back into that retracted position so even if the toes are trying to activate they can't reach the floor because they've got these ropes that are pulling them away from the floor so what we want to try and do is stretch these tendons and the muscles that live at the front of the shin now it's a really easy thing to do you just need to be able to get your foot up or your leg up like I have now you can support it with one hand in case you feel like your leg's going to slip off then all we're going to do is point the toes down so they go down that way you try and curl your toes up you take your hand over the top of your foot like this just over the toes we're just going to pull down that way okay now it doesn't take long before again you start to feel that really tight stretching sensation all the way up here that means that you're in the right position so we want to feel that stretch it shouldn't be a 10 out of 10 it should be about a 4 out of 10 discomfort just tolerable enough so that you can feel a stretch happening but not enough so that you're in agony and you're just going to hold that position for 30 seconds and once you've done that you can swap over and do the other side so you bring the other foot up like this support the leg take that hand over the top of your foot and just pull down towards that way this time and we should feel the stretch again at the front of the leg and the foot holding for 30 seconds and I recommend people who are struggling with this problem do this stretch at least three or four times per day on each side and that can give an instant Improvement when you stop the stretch you should find you're instantly able to get your toes more in contact with the floor and your balance should be better straight away now before you go the other thing that's very important for this type of problem is choosing the right Footwear so I see some people talking about barefoot shoes or walking bare foot these can be really good options for improving your toe space but you have to introduce them slowly and they're certainly not suitable for everyone for example if you don't have very much cushioning on the bottom of your foot walking around with barefoot shoes on is probably going to make you quite sore so make sure you get some personalized advice on that one but generally we don't recommend shoes that squeeze your toes into a tight fitting toe point at the front because that is going to make the problem worse so you need something with a bit of a wide fit at the front and that will stop this problem from getting any worse so those are my simple tips to instantly improve your balance to get your toes in contact with the floor I hope that video has been useful if it has do drop me a comment below because I genuinely love to read your thoughts and if you want to get more from me you can pick up loads more tips like this in my book it's called thriving Beyond 50 and you can find it on Amazon using the link below I just want to say thank you so much for watching I genuinely appreciate the time you spend watching these videos I hope they're useful and I'll see you on the next one

Channel: HT Physio – Over-Fifties Specialist Physio

Views: 903,295

Keywords: Physiotherapy, Knee Pain, Health, Exercise, Wellness, senior health, Over fifty, total knee replacement, physical therapy, knee pain, physical therapy (medical specialty), bob and brad, athlean X, OA knee, knee bend, walking, knee pain when walking, knee strength, strong legs, improve mobility, better walking, gait, falls, balance, prevent falls, vestibular, walking hunched over, hunch, dowagers hump, walking problems, posture, bad posture, falls prevention

Id: 5ljJSe2SpYk

Length: 9min 0sec (540 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 07 2024