Balance training is also important to improve postural alignment of the body and assist in developing coordinated movement patterns. This means you must first be stable in your most proximal joints closest to your trunk. Only following proximal stability can you stabilize something more distally further away from your trunk. For example, you must be strong and balanced in a standing position prior to being able to lift a box. When balance and stability are incorporated early in an exercise program your body will be in proper alignment.
Proper alignment maximizes effects of your workout and reduces risk of injury. The more stable we are, the more we can control the forces acting on our body and the less prone we are to injury.
A systematic review, by DeStefano et al. Balance training performed 10 minutes per day, 3 days per week, for 4 weeks improves balance. You now know the difference between balance and stability and how to improve your exercise performance and reduce your risk of injury during daily activities.
Want to learn more about exercise terminology and how they affect not only your exercise routine but your daily life? Check out my other articles:.
What to learn more about exercise and improving your function. Here I show your 5 simple exercises to improve your posture and reduce neck pain and stiffness. This means you can lift more, run faster, kick harder, hit further or swing faster.
This means more force is delivered to the ground to propel the runner forward and hence the faster the runner will run. From an injury prevention perspective, it is simple, the more stable we are, the less prone we are to injury.
It predisposes someone to: lower back pain, gluteal tendinopathy, trochanteric bursitis, ITB syndrome, patella-femoral pain syndrome, shin splints, tibialis posterior tendinopathy, plantar fasciopathy, among other conditions. The more stable the base of our movement, the more we can control the force throughout our body. Balance is our ability to keep our centre of mass within the limits of our base of support, whether this is static or dynamic.
It is responsible for keeping us upright whether standing still or moving. Stability is much more than this. Stability is the ability to control forces, which may be unbalanced, in order to remain balanced. For other performance improvement tips, see our recent blog post here. To make an appointment with one of our physiotherapists go to our website. The participants stood on the force plate and the pressure distribution beneath the feet was recorded. As the pressure shifted, the postural sway path of the center of pressure COP was calculated.
COP is a virtual measurement point describing the center of the pressure sensors in order to characterize the spatial distribution of pressure over time Buldt et al. COP provides values of the path length, the mean velocity, and the area of postural sway. These COP measurements appear to be equally reliable for investigating general postural stability and balance Ruhe et al.
Therefore, in this study, the area of postural sway was used as the dependent variable. A high value denotes a large area of postural sway, which indicates poor control of postural stability Winter, This could possibly be due to increased muscular tension causing postural immobility Hamaoui et al. It has already been shown that body weight is a predictor of postural stability.
Hue et al. Thus, body weight seems to be correlated with postural instability. To test if this variable also predicts the area of sway in the current study population, a similar regression analysis on the COP-EoC value and body weight was conducted. Furthermore, other demographic variables, such as gender and age, were also included.
Since Hamaoui et al. The results of Hamaoui et al. Therefore, to investigate this variable for the current study sample, the amount of sports exercises that the participants provided see below were inserted to the regression analysis.
In addition to the regression analysis with the whole sample, a second regression analysis has been performed only for the musicians including additional music-related variables. One could expect that especially the amount of practicing and playing the instrument may provoke a postural bias. Consequently, the years of playing the instrument, the time practicing per day, and the average musical performances in a year have been included to the analysis.
One theory about postural balance depicts posture as being a swinging inverted pendulum. As such, it could be possible that a wider distance between the feet can result in a less swaying posture due to the larger standing area. Both variables were measured visually from the images of the feet captured on screen. The distance between the centers of the feet had been provided by the software. The measured angle was the two-sided opening angle between the feet.
Another outcome variable provided by the force plate was body weight balance, which is the percentage of limb load calculated by the pressure difference underneath both feet.
This value indicates a possible imbalance in the postural equilibrium between the left and right sides. Such limb load asymmetry cannot be used to diagnose specific postural problems, but can imply a disturbance of the self-perception of standing in a balanced posture. This disturbance may be caused by frequently performing in non-optimal postures Ramella et al.
In this study the postural balance value was categorized into balanced and imbalanced postures. However, it is not clear to which extent these limits are considered to be out of balance. For the measuring procedure, the participants had to stand on the force platform without shoes for 20s. Participants were told to adopt a neutral and relaxed position without any restrictions on how to stand.
This procedure was equal to Pomarino et al. Only extreme postures showing too large or too small a distance or angle between the feet were corrected to achieve standing postures where the feet distance equals more the width of the pelvis. The participants were also instructed to breathe normally during the measurement process. During all this time, they were not holding an instrument. COP and postural balance measures were averaged across the recording time. Participants were measured in two different conditions.
Most of the participants stood continuously on the platform across conditions, but in some cases, participants left the platform between the different conditions. In the first condition, participants had to stand in a natural position with the arms alongside the body.
The standard body posture of the participants was recorded in this condition. In the second condition, participants were asked to stretch out the arms to the front in a degree angle to the torso. They had to hold their arms in this position for the complete duration of recording. This posture activates specific muscle areas such as the shoulder muscles infra- and supraspinatus and postural musculature.
A sustained elevated arm position can lead to repressions of local muscle activity in the torso, the back and the belly and can result in higher muscular tension with regards to posture Palmerud et al.
It was expected therefore, that the COP-EoC would reduce in this condition compared to the arms by side condition. For instrumental musicians, the arms are always required in instrumental playing, either to hold the instrument or to maintain sound production, or even for both uses.
As some instruments cannot be held whilst standing on the force platform, the second condition was used to simulate a muscular activity in the arms that was standardized for all participants.
The difference to the arms by side condition provides evidence of the effect of muscular tension on postural stability.
To facilitate the measurement of the music students, the force platform was installed in the entrance hall of the University of Music, Freiburg, and students were asked to voluntarily participate in the study.
Once they had agreed, they were measured with the force platform and were asked to complete a questionnaire. The length of the total procedure was about 3—4 min. The control group was measured in the entrance area in front of a medical lecture hall in the Medical Centre, University of Freiburg, with an identical procedure as for the music group. All data collection was completely anonymous. The questionnaire consisted of general questions on gender, age, body weight, and body height.
Furthermore, participants were also asked if they had a problem with their musculoskeletal system that restricted them in their movement and activity range, which might potentially impair their body posture.
If so, they were also asked to briefly describe the kind of problem they had. A question about handedness was included for the musicians in order to determine their rate of left-handedness. Limb dominance was not included since no relationship has been found between limb dominance and preference of the side of weight Hesse et al.
The participants were asked to rate their current feeling on a five-point scale [ 1 physically relaxed, 3 as usual, and 5 physically tense. On another five-point scale, they had to indicate how often they participated in endurance sports [ 1 several times in a week, 2 once in a week, 3 once every 2 weeks, 4 once in a month, and 5 never].
The musicians were asked to name their main instrument and to declare the years of how long they already played the instrument. Additionally, they had to estimate their amount of usual practice time hours per day and the number of concerts they normally performed per year.
They were also asked about the degree course they were studying Bachelor, Masters, or school teaching degree. The music group contained music students at the University of Music, Freiburg.
The average age was They were studying either Bachelor The students spent on average 2. Table 1. Description of the study sample in brackets: standard deviation of the mean. The control group needed to be comprised of students similar in age to the musicians, but without any experience of playing an instrument. For that, 44 medicine students were recruited.
Since there were medicine students who had learned and were currently played an instrument, they were asked before the measurement procedure whether they did play an instrument, and if affirmative, they were not included in the study. There were The gender distribution and the mean age did not differ significantly between the music and the control groups. A problem with the musculoskeletal system was reported by a third This amount did not differ significantly between the music and the control group.
The problems described were similar in both groups and included either previous incidences of conditions such as tendovaginitis, accidents involving broken bones or joints, and torn ligaments, or permanent chronic symptoms, such as pain in the arm or knee joints, dorsal pain, slipped disc, or scoliosis.
In terms of their current emotional state, the students reported a mean value of 2. A value less than 3 was reported by No significant difference was found between the genders.
In total, 9. Where Furthermore, There was no significant difference between genders. The musical instruments were categorized into several instrumental groups, which were then used for the analysis Table 2. Table 2. Description of the musical instruments in the music group, number of musicians who played the instrument, percentage in the sample of musicians, and the mean years of playing the instrument with standard deviation SD.
On average, the musicians played their main instrument for more than 13 years Table 2. No difference between the genders was found. The lowest mean years of practice were found for the vocal and the organ groups and the highest for the piano and the upper strings group.
Descriptive statistics were calculated for each variable. Metrical variables were reported with mean and standard deviation of the mean SD. Contingency tables were used to assess the distribution differences of any non-parametric variables, and Chi-square statistics were reported. Two linear regression analyses with stepwise regression were performed separately on the COP-EoC for both conditions on the whole sample and only for the music group.
The model statistics with explained variance corrected R 2 and the beta coefficient with t - and p -values of the significant predictors were provided. The Wilcoxon signed-rank test was used to compare the changes of preferred standing side between conditions. The level of statistical significance was set to 0. The mean values for the music and the control group are shown in Table 3.
Furthermore, no significant differences were found between genders, for handedness and for having a problem in the musculoskeletal system in both conditions. Table 3. Mean values of the centre of pressure ellipse of confidence COP-EoC , the distance and angle between the feet for each group in brackets: standard deviation of the mean. A multivariate ANOVA has been performed on the distance and the angle between both feet with the factors gender and group.
The distance between the feet was across all participants No significant effects were found for gender. The participants stood on the platform with an average angle of To test for possible predictors of the COP-EoC, a linear regression analysis was performed with gender, age, body weight, the distance, and the angle between both feet, having a problem in the musculoskeletal system, the ratings of current emotional state, and the amount of sports exercises as variables separately for both conditions.
A second linear regression analysis was conducted with both COP-EoC variables on the music group only. The included factors were the same as in the first regression analysis with the addition of the years of playing the instrument, the average practice time, and the average number of performances in a year.
The explained variance was 8. The COP-EoC was compared using a multivariate analysis across the instrumental groups including the control group for both conditions. Figure 1. However, by separating the analyses into the different instrumental groups there were some instruments where COP-EoC did not decrease significantly, such as in the upper strings and the bassoon.
In the postural balance measurement, the mean percentage on the left foot across all participants was There was no significant difference between the music and the control groups, genders, or instrumental groups. The standard deviation of the mean percentage on the left foot across all participants of 3. The center line represents equal weight distribution between the left and right feet.
Figure 2. Percentages of the postural balance with standing more on the left or on the right foot divided by instrumental group and condition. The percentages of preferred sides were compared individually between each instrument and the control group. In the first condition, the piano group contained This was significantly different to the control group with 9.
Similarly, in the upper strings group, there were more participants who stood to the left side In the lower strings group significantly more people stood on the right foot A third of the guitar players Moreover, a third of the percussionists No significant distribution differences were found for voice, woodwind, brass, flute, and organ.
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