How Pilates Helps to Improve Your Balance
Pilates helps improve your balance by building core strength, creating better body awareness, and stabilizing your lower body.
To give some perspective, 1 in 4 adults over 65 fall each year in the United States. Falls are the leading cause of injury-related death in older adults. In 2024 more than 43,000 adults over 65 died from a fall.**
Pilates is an AMAZING way to address the strength you need for better balance. The stronger you are from the inside out, the better you’ll move, the more balanced you’ll be and most important the less likely you will be to incur and injury or fall. Keep reading for all of the benefits of pilates on balance!
Core Strength
Pilates targets your deep abdominal muscles, lower back, hips and pelvic floor.
This area acts as your body's center of power and stability.
A strong core keeps your torso steady when you move or stand and is the basis of all exercises.
Proprioception and Body Awareness
Pilates teaches you to focus on how your body moves in space.
This skill is known as proprioception.
Better spatial awareness helps you catch yourself quickly if you start to wobble or trip.
Falls and injuries typically happen in the mundane day to day of our lives, not while working out. This is why honing in on balance, strength, stability and mobility are so important. They make you ready to live!
Lower Body Stability
Many exercises target the hips, glutes, ankles, and calves.
Strong ankles and stable hips form a solid base of support for standing and walking.
Improved gait means better balance
Pilates addresses how your feet function because it is barefoot. Not wearing shoes is one of the best things you can do for your feet. It will keep them moving/articulating better and therefore make you walk/balance better.
If you can balance without a shoe on, you will balance even better with shoes on!
Foot strength and mobility is addressed through exercises like footwork on the reformer, soleus press on the wunda chair, and with the foot corrector, just to name a few. You can find all kinds of feet focused classes in my On Demand Library here!
I hope you enjoyed reading this! If you did, be sure to share it with a friend. And, if you’d like to learn more about how balance and longevity are related, check out this article here from the LA Times.
xx, Ashley
** Reference: LA Times: This powerful predictor of longevity isn’t what you think