Balance board is a really useful fitness tool that can improve your strength, balance and coordination. Balance board is not only useful for your body but it is also useful for your mind, with a balance board you can improve your spatial awareness and even injury rehabilitation doesn’t feel like work.
Another great thing about a balance board is that it’s easily portable and doesn’t take a lot of space. Balance board has other great benefits which we’ll discuss later on.
Why Is Balance Important ?
Balance is all about maintaining your balance at the center of the gravity while you are still moving and standing. It can also prevent injuries and correct incorrect movements.
If you are not balancing correctly, then your muscles are not doing the job. Of course, you need to practice first and soon your muscles will adapt and you’ll balance correctly.
Balance Board Benefits for your Entire Body
As I said earlier, at the beginning it will be difficult, but if you keep practicing you’ll see noticeable results. A balance board forces us to concentrate on keeping the board level.
Balance training can also help to engage your proprioception sense. There was an article which implies 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 very important, it doesn’t matter if it’s sports, athletics or everyday life.
Developing your Core Muscles:
Balance boards are also good to develop the muscles that you avoided due to poor balance. Here are some few major core muscles:
- 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)
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. The main function of those muscles is to support our torso and keep the spine upright, and when those muscles are weak it can cause chronic lower pain. Balance boards can strengthen those muscles quickly and efficiently. If you are waking up every day with lower back pain, then maybe you should start working on these muscles.
Improving your Agility:
Agility is essential. It doesn’t matter if the person is a professional athlete or not, the ability to switch from one position to another quickly is of big importance. Moving quickly on any surface or any direction is important for a healthy balanced body. Using a balance board will improve your agility and also prevent injuries.
Creating Better Posture:
A lot of people these days struggle from poor posture, the main reason for this problem is the 9-5 office jobs where they hunch over desk and keyboard every day, there are also truck drivers who ride across the country while they are driving for hours.
Because of that it causes constant rounding on our backs and keeping our shoulders hunched from weak skeletal muscles. With a balance board you can improve your posture and keep your spine in a straight line. Balance boards help strengthen those muscles that usually don’t get worked out.
It Strengthens Your Mind
People might get confused when they hear that something like a balance board can improve you mentally. Obviously it helps you physically, but it can also help your concentration, language development in children, and even increased memory can also be improved.
Enhance Brain Function:
The extra benefit of these balance boards is that it improves the brain’s function. There was research done which implies improves memory and spatial cognition. Syncing our neural networks to maintain our balance consists of intense levels of concentration.
With this we can improve our memory and focus. In order to continue balancing on the board, you need fast reflexes. After practicing this for some time your mind will naturally improve the way your mind responds to tasks. The extra benefit of improving your mind is when finding yourself on an unstable surface you will quickly recover and prevent an injury from falling.