Tai Chi could be the secret to improving your balance and living longer.
Standing on one leg is one of those things that’s supposed to be very good for you, especially as you get older. It’s the sort of thing that you keep hearing studies about. It’s supposed to reduce falls and make you more coordinated. It’s even an indicator of when you will die. People who cannot stand on one leg for 10 seconds are found to be almost twice as likely to die within 10 years.
As the (now late) great Dr Michael Mosley wrote:
“When you attempt the one leg balance, your brain is performing a remarkable amount of coordination. It integrates signals coming from the fluid in your inner ears, visual cues from eyes, and even feedback from your joints and muscles. Signals from your eyes play a big role in maintaining your balance, which helps explain why standing on one leg is significantly harder when you close your eyes. If you can reach 10 seconds with your eyes closed, you’re doing well.” – Michael Mosley.
As you can see, the process of balancing is a lot more complicated than most of us realise. Of course, standing on one leg is also something that we do in Tai Chi a lot, we just don’t make a big deal about it.
Therefore, to hear that a one legged stand has all these extra health benefits is great news, since we’re doing it anyway in our Tai Chi kicks, which are often done slowly, so can take 2-3 seconds to accomplish, all of which is time spent with one leg off the ground.
(That photo, by the way, is a free image from the Unsplash website – and it’s actually very nicely done. A lot of the images on Unsplash that appear for a search on “tai chi” are so bad I can’t use them here, but that one is pretty good. Look at that nice vertical alignment from head to foot down the spine and leg. Perfect!)
I find that balancing on one leg is something that beginner students in Tai Chi really struggle with. They wobble, a lot, but I think it’s just from lack of practice, and as the article says, you can get better at it very quickly. You build new nerve connections and recalibrate your brain, simply by practicing.
As this article by fellow Bath resident and journalist, Joel Snape, explains, having good balance becomes increasingly important as you get older. He also makes the argument for Tai Chi as a great way to improve your balance, and makes the important point that the standing leg needs to be bent:
“Standing on one straight leg isn’t the same as standing on one bent leg,” says Locker, who began practising tai chi with a master who “could throw guys half his age and twice his size around the room”. “When the leg is straight, the skeleton supports the body, not the postural muscles. Older people are commonly advised to practice brushing their teeth standing on one leg to build their balance, but in order to train the postural muscles to support the lower body, you should use one bent leg.” This way, over time, you’ll build not just balance but work capacity. – Joel Snape.
So, it’s important to bend your knee (even if it’s just slightly) when standing on one leg. This is something I notice about beginners in Tai Chi. Whenever the feet come together it’s natural to want to straighten your legs, as if you were doing a Waltz. Learning to keep your feet together and your knees bent is a skill that has to be learned over time, and is much harder to do than you think. As soon as your mind wanders off, your legs will straighten. If you can get good at this, then when it comes to standing on one leg, it will be much easier to keep the standing leg slightly bent at the knee.
You can train Tai Chi with me in Bath/Bristol, and get better at standing on one leg, twice a week.
