Heart of Motion

Balancing Act: The Symphony of Movement, Stability, and Proprioception

• Susannah Steers • Season 1 • Episode 13

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Picture this: you're on a treadmill, and suddenly, you trip—your body reacts instinctively, keeping you from hitting the ground. This episode of Heart of Motion unpacks how our bodies maintain balance, whether on a treadmill or in everyday life. I guide you through the fascinating world of balance, exploring the harmony between our vestibular, visual, sensory motor, and musculoskeletal systems. These intricate systems work together to ensure we stay upright, whether we're engaging in sports, or simply enjoying life to the fullest. 

Get ready to expand your understanding of proprioception, often dubbed our sixth sense, which allows us to sense our body's position without relying on sight. We'll dive into the critical roles of ligaments, tendons, muscles, and fascia, emphasizing their importance in maintaining stability and preventing injuries. 

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Heart of Motion Podcast host Susannah Steers is a Pilates & Integrated Movement Specialist and owner of Moving Spirit Pilates in North Vancouver, BC. She is passionate about movement, about connections and about life.

Through movement teaching, speaking, and facilitating workshops, she supports people in creating movement practices that promote fitness from the inside out. She loves building community, and participating in multi-disciplinary collaborations.

Along with her friend and colleague Gillian McCormick, Susannah also co-hosts The Small Conversations for a Better World podcast – an interview based podcast dedicated to promoting the kind of conversations about health that can spark positive change in individuals, families, communities and across the globe.

Social Media Links:
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Susannah Steers:

Welcome to the Heart of Motion podcast. I'm Susanna Steers and I'll be your host as we explore the heart, soul and science of movement as a pathway to more active, vibrant and connected living. Nothing happens until something moves, so let's get started.

Susannah Steers:

A bunch of years ago, I was at the gym on a treadmill. I was in my late 40s and treadmills were fairly new for me. I was almost finished my workout and I dropped something onto the treadmill. Without thinking, I stopped to pick it up. The treadmill was still moving. You can imagine where this is going.

Susannah Steers:

Somehow, though, I didn't end up in an Instagram fails highlight reel, because in the split second that I reached down to pick the thing up, my brain realized that the treadmill was still rolling and, with my head still down, I simply hopped up and landed with my feet on the stable rails on either side. It wasn't conscious thought. My body simply reacted, counting myself lucky. I stood up, turned off my treadmill and shook my head at what had almost happened. I saw the folks around me looking over with their mouths agape. I had managed to unconsciously avert what most in that moment probably figured would be a disaster, or at least something funny to tell their friends I could say it was luck and there was definitely a good dose of that. But my system reacted to the situation quickly and the problem was solved even before I registered there was one. Mostly, I have to thank a healthy vestibular system and years of training in modern dance, which taught me to move in different ways in relation to gravity. Thankfully, my brain was able to make sense of things while I was upside down and direct my body to do what it needed to do to rescue me from a potentially disastrous situation and tumbling off the end of the treadmill in a heap.

Susannah Steers:

Today, on the pod, we're diving into the subject of balance what it is, how it works and what we can do to get better at it. My little story was a real-life example of how our sense of balance can help us navigate our world safely and effectively. A few weeks ago, my colleague Allison Burt and I presented a workshop called the Ins and Outs of Balance to introduce the different aspects of balance and explore what we can do to improve it. We broke our presentation down into elements deep inside the brain and the nervous system and the outer or the musculoskeletal part. Today's podcast is based on that presentation.

Susannah Steers:

At its most basic balance is about distributing your weight in such a way that you can stand and move around without falling or recover if you do trip. It's important in sports and other athletic pursuits Biking, skating, running, snowboarding, paddleboarding, surfing, hiking, dancing, rock climbing anything you can think of. As we age, good balance is crucial so that we can live independently for as long as possible and continue to do the activities we enjoy. Often when we talk about balance, people bring up the ability to stand still on one foot without falling over. And, yeah, being able to do that is important, but it's only one small element of balance. True, functional balance is actually about movement. It allows us to move through the world on our feet and injury-free.

Susannah Steers:

Balance means different things in different contexts. Think about a balanced diet, work-life balance, a balanced checkbook, balanced flavor in a recipe. All of these scenarios have a common theme in which different elements of the whole are operating in the correct proportions for the elegant and effective function of the whole thing. When we apply this to the body, it means that you need many different systems working in harmony with one another. Elements of your vestibular and your visual systems are working together with your sensory motor system and your musculoskeletal structure to provide awareness, sensation, stability, mobility, responsiveness and adaptability. The better your balance, the more freedom you have to push the envelope in your favorite sport or just to live a full and confident life at every age.

Susannah Steers:

So let's dig in. Think about the last time you walked on an uneven trail or rode a bike, or simply stood up from a chair. Each of these actions required a complex interplay of different systems inside your body, constantly adjusting and readjusting to keep you upright and moving. Then let's think about the last time you slipped but didn't fall, or maybe then slipped and did fall. In both of those situations, the same kind of inner dialogue has to happen. When you didn't fall, the conversation was successful. Your brain, your body and your nervous system figured out what was going on, made a choice about how to correct it, and you had the physical capacity to right yourself before things went too far sideways. But that time you fell down, the inner dance was less successful. Somewhere along the chain, something didn't get those instantaneous calculations quite right. Maybe you didn't have the capacity to manage the situation you found yourself in, so you weren't able to recover before falling.

Susannah Steers:

At its core, balance is about harmony different elements working together in the right proportions to create a stable yet flexible whole. No matter what you're doing, the more you practice, the better you get. Evidence shows that while aging does create changes in the vestibular system, a much more important factor in the decline of balance in older people is lack of use. The inner workings of balance are largely managed by your vestibular system, which is a little like your built-in GPS. Your brain takes in information from your eyes, from your inner ear and proprioceptive organs all over your body and then synthesizes it all to keep you on your feet. The intricate connection between our eyes and our brain allows us to fixate on objects even as our heads move, a phenomenon known as the vestibular-ocular reflex. If your eyes are fixed in one place but your body is in motion ocular reflex. If your eyes are fixed in one place but your body is in motion, that same reflex will let you know that your body is moving, but that the world around you is not. I think it's fascinating that about 20% of the neural fibers that connect your eyes to your brain relate to balance, not just division. Part of this whole system involves proprioception, which is basically about different types of nerves measuring your body's position in space, its experience of gravity, the amount of effort it's using and the amount of force being exerted on it. These proprioceptive organs get sensory information from your joints and your muscles and skin and fascia and they're constantly feeding that information to the brain. The information is processed unconsciously in the cerebellum and the brainstem and you can respond very quickly without conscious thought.

Susannah Steers:

In your inner ears there are five organs that are dedicated to balance. Their job is to translate mechanical information that they detect into electrical information to be interpreted by the brain. How do they do it? It's a fluid system. All those inner ear organs use a mechanism involving hair cells in fluid. When you move your body, the fluid inside the inner ear moves in response, which bends those inner hair cells and excites the nerves leading to the brain. They measure two different kinds of information Linear acceleration, which happens when you're doing something like accelerating in a car or going up in an elevator, and angular acceleration, which happens when you move your head in relation to your body, looking up as you prepare to serve a tennis ball, for example.

Susannah Steers:

Nestled deep inside your inner ear, imagine three tiny, loopy water slides about the size of a pinky nail. These are the semicircular canals, and as the fluid moves around within them. They can measure whether the angle of your head is changing, nodding up and down, shaking side to side or tilting. Now imagine two tiny jelly-filled water balloons nestled in your inner ear, each about the size of a grain of rice. These are called your otolith organs, nature's very own built-in levels. They are the saccule and the utricle that's what they're called. They measure whether your head is moving in space, but not whether it's moving relative to your body. The utricle, the larger of the two, is like a horizontal hammock swinging lazily in your skull. It's like the couch potato of the pair, preferring to feel motion in the horizontal plane. If you're walking forward and backward and you can feel yourself moving in space, that's your utricle in action. Meanwhile, the saccule stands up like a little eager meerkat, always on the lookout for vertical movements. If you can feel gravity acting on your body right now, that's because of the saccules are doing their thing.

Susannah Steers:

Training these is relatively simple. In addition to traditional balance exercises that you might be doing at the gym, incorporate movements that include changes in your body's orientation to space and your head's orientation to your body, while the physical components of these organs don't succumb to age-related damage the way, for example, your hearing does. If they are used less frequently, if you're not practicing stuff that challenges them, the neural pathways they generate will dissipate when it stops getting used. The structures are also really sensitive to oxygen, so if they're not well oxygenated they won't function well. So good blood flow and cardiovascular health are really important for your balance. That's pretty much true for every system in the body, but particularly for the brain. So if the vestibular system provides our own high-tech, built-in GPS, then the musculoskeletal system provides both your sleek chassis and a powerful engine. But let's get real. Your body is way cooler than any car. It's like having a living, breathing work of art that can dance, jump, play and maybe even do the occasional cartwheel. While our internal systems provide the information, it's our musculoskeletal system that executes that intricate dance of balance.

Susannah Steers:

Did you know that even when you think you are standing perfectly still, your body is throwing a tiny little dance party In every moment? Our bodies are making tiny, constant adjustments. This is called postural sway and it's a subtle, ongoing conversation between our body and the forces of gravity. You want to feel it? Try this. Stand up in the middle of the room, making sure you have some space around you. Stand with your feet together and feel what happens in your body. Notice how it moves. Now holding the same position, close your eyes. What do you notice in your body now? Any wobbles or wiggles. That's your postural sway.

Susannah Steers:

When we have enough mobility to allow our body parts to react and soften any disruptions or balance challenges, and when we have enough stability and strength to counterbalance and right ourselves, we likely have good postural sway and probably pretty good balance. The body can kind of flow through its organizational challenges around all the things it's looking after, and the body sorts itself out easily. Often, though, holes in the integrity of the musculoskeletal structures show up here. If there are areas of the body with too much mobility or too much stiffness, our ability to either hold ourselves stable enough or permit enough motion to maintain balance can be compromised. Beginning to understand your postural sway, where it shows up in a more pronounced way, where the postural sway gives in to losing balance and so on understanding those things can help us understand what we need to improve to improve our balance.

Susannah Steers:

Before I go any further, I should probably talk about proprioception again. You've heard of the five senses, right. Proprioception is often considered your sixth sense. It's the body's ability to perceive its position, movement and action without relying on visual cues, facilitated by proprioceptors located in muscles, tendons and joints, which send information to the brain about body positioning and movement. It plays a crucial role in coordination and balance, allowing us to perform activities like walking or catching a ball without consciously thinking about our movements. It's how you can touch your nose with your eyes closed. It's how high-level athletes can somehow find a puck with their stick or catch the basketball while flying through the air eyes nowhere near their target. It can almost seem like magic. Sometimes, all this magic is moved into motion by real tissues in our body, also known as the musculoskeletal system.

Susannah Steers:

The key players in this outer system of balance are the ligaments, the tendons, the muscles and the fascia. They work together to provide stability, transmit force and allow for movement. They're basically the physical manifestation of our body's balanced systems. At work, your ligaments are the tough guys. They connect bones to other bones and provide passive stability to the joints, which allow your muscles to make finer adjustments to balance without losing stability in the joints. If you slip and one leg goes flying out, the ligaments can provide a kind of check reins to that movement, helping to prevent injury. So you don't go too far to that movement. Helping to prevent injury, so you don't go too far. Tendons are like cables that connect your muscles to your bones. They transmit the force generated by the muscles to the skeleton, allowing for movement and stability for the bones. Like ligaments, the tendons provide a base level of tension that allows muscles to make finer adjustments without losing joint stability. That allows muscles to make finer adjustments without losing joint stability. They also have a little elasticity, which allows for really rapid force transmission, which allows for a quick response when there are unexpected balance challenges.

Susannah Steers:

Muscles are the real movers and shakers. Muscles generate the force necessary to maintain and adjust posture. They contract and relax in response to signals from the brain, allowing you to maintain your position and adjust dynamically. They're constantly in play. You can feel it in your own postural sway and when you slip, the muscles are the ones tensing up to save you faster than you can say oops. Muscles provide active stability to joints, complementing the passive stability that we talked about with the ligaments. This is really important in weight-bearing joints like the ankles, the knees and the hips. I've often talked about connections and relationships on this podcast. What I might not have spent so much time talking about is the idea that the health of individual tissues can play a role in how those relationships play out in the body.

Susannah Steers:

If you've ever sprained your ankle, you know that unless you're diligent with your rehab, that ankle may be susceptible to future strains and sprains Because the tissue maybe didn't knit back together as strongly as the original ligament. You might even have had the experience of injuring the same ankle in the same way many times. In this case, the integrity of the ligament has been compromised. You have less passive stability around the joint and you're maybe more prone to going over on that ankle again. It's kind of like a game in which one player isn't passing messages along properly or managing their role adequately. The good news is that, like with any great team, when one player isn't working at their best, other players on the team can pick up the slack. If you sprain your ankle, and especially if you've done it multiple times, you might want to look at training the muscles that stabilize the joint more robustly. That way, the muscles can take over or help the ligaments in their job.

Susannah Steers:

Overall. Muscle imbalances, muscle tensions, weak and overactive muscles, places where there's been some kind of injury All of this can affect how well we're able to maintain and move with good posture and balance. Ideally, we create balanced tone around our joints, connect to a responsive core system, strengthen our muscles in a way that promotes both power and mobility. That often gets forgotten. Some of the most important areas to focus on from a balance perspective are your ankles and your feet, your hip muscles, your back and your abdominal muscles, your neck and your lower legs. When you're training to strengthen your muscles, remember that too much stiffness or lack of mobility due to overactivity will affect balance too. So you've got to remember it's not just strength training. Your body's got to be able to move. If your body can't allow a gentle postural sway that you need to soften whatever balance perturbations you're dealing with, you're going to be in trouble. Stamina, strength and mobility are equally important.

Susannah Steers:

Now, in my little anatomy roundup there, I didn't include fascia. Research into the nature and role of fascia in our bodies is an emerging and exciting science. Fascia is a continuous three-dimensional web of connective tissue that surrounds and penetrates every muscle, bone, nerve, artery, vein and organ in the body. Fascia is rich in proprioceptors and provides a body-wide tensional network. Fascia can be described as a proprioceptive organ and just like muscles, when the fascia is dehydrated and tight or if it's too loose, it can lose some of its ability to sense and communicate to your brain and to the rest of your body what's going on. Layers of fascia can sometimes lose their slide, which affects mobility and, consequently, balance. We could do an entire episode about fascia, or really about any element of the balance system really, but in short, the best way to work with fascia is to move. Move often, in as many different ways as you can, hydrate the tissues with water and with movement.

Susannah Steers:

Balance is about relationships within our bodies and between our bodies and the world around us. It's a constant negotiation, a give and take, much like the delicate balance we see in nature. Remember the Polynesian ocean wayfinders I talked about in the very first episode of the podcast? Their ability to navigate vast oceans relied heavily on their sense of balance not just the physical balance on their canoes, but a balance of knowledge, intuition and connection with their environment. Improving our balance isn't just about preventing falls or enhancing athletic performance. It's about developing a deeper connection with our bodies and with the world around us.

Susannah Steers:

Take some time and some care to play with your balance in different ways in your day-to-day and I think you'll find it pays off in maybe some unexpected ways. Practice mindful movement. Pay attention to how you move through the day. Challenge your balance from time to time. Try simple exercises like standing on one foot while you're brushing your teeth. Move your eyes and your head around while you do it. Explore different movement practices, things like Pilates, tai Chi, yoga, dance. Those can all enhance your sense of balance.

Susannah Steers:

Connect with nature. Spend some time outdoors, feeling the ground underneath your feet and the air around you. There's something wonderful about the unpredictability of the terrain and the conditions that you find in nature that are all good for balance. And then think about it. What other aspects of your life could benefit from some attention to balance? Remember, it's not a static state to be achieved. Trying to keep things even Steven, all the time is not only exhausting but impossible. Balance is a dynamic process to be lived. It's about finding harmony amidst constant change, much like the ebb and the flow of the tides or the changing of the seasons. We are nature after all. So there you go, A brief little primer on balance.

Susannah Steers:

I'd like to thank and give credit to my colleague and my partner in crime, pilates teacher and Franklin Method educator Alison Burt, who collaborated with me in the creation of the Ins and Outs of Balance workshop, which is an experiential and playful deep dive into all things balance, giving people practical strategies for understanding their balance, recognizing individual challenges and learning what to do to improve it. We'll be running that workshop again in the spring of 2025, so keep your eyes on the Moving Spirit Pilates website for more information if you're interested, and with that, the conclusion of the first season of the Heart of Motion podcast is upon us. I've had a lot of fun, talked to some amazing people and learned some really interesting things along the way. I hope that my journey into movement geekery is fun for you too, and that maybe you've learned something along the way.

Susannah Steers:

I'll be investigating more about movement and about life in general in the new year. Please let me know if there's something that you're dying to know more about, and until then, the podcast will be back on the first Monday in January 2025. See you then. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Subscribe and, if you love what you heard, leave a five-star review and tell people what you enjoyed most. Join me here again in a couple of weeks. For now, let's get moving.

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