Does Yoga Improve Balance?

I was reading through comments on a Yoga Instagram post the other day, and a question that kept on popping up was “Does yoga improve balance?”

Yoga improves your balance by strengthening and toning your core muscles, your pelvic floor, and your gluttes, along with the muscles that wrap around your spine.

It also aids in strengthening your postural muscles (deep muscles in your abdomen, pelvis and back), which, as the name indicates, help you improve your body posture.

Having a good balance is essential, whether it is to avoid falls or to be more comfortable in our daily life. 

In this article we dive deep into how practicing yoga actually helps you improve your balance, and why it may be one of the best holistic ways to do it. 

Read on to find out…

How does Yoga improve balance?

Yoga offers a wide range of health benefits and each position, in turn, offers different benefits; both for the mind, as well as for the body and spirit. 

The balance positions do not work only on a physical level by strengthening the muscles necessary to keep us in position, but also work strongly on our mind, gradually bringing us into a state of inner calm.

Improves your physical balance

On a physical level, Yoga helps you improve coordination, increase strength, and develop stability. 

With regular practice, you will be more coordinated and benefit from improvements in your stamina and stability, both during yoga practice, as well as in daily life. 

For older people, improved stability and balance help reduce injuries due to falls, which are so common as you age.

Each Yoga balance position strengthens the muscles and joints of your body differently. 

The standing positions work mainly by strengthening your leg muscles and knee joints; while balancing positions on the arms strengthen your wrists, arms, and shoulder muscles. 

For this reason, you must vary your balance positions to obtain the maximum benefit.

improves your Breathing

In yoga, improving balance means working on stability, but also on calm and concentration. 

Much of it involves abdominal breathing, as Daniel Lacerda writes in his book 2100 Asanas, the encyclopedia of yoga postures (ed. Marabout):

“Breathing promotes stability. If your breathing is racing, it is probably because you are going too forcefully. Release the posture a bit and let your breath settle.”

Help you attain Inner balance

The most exciting part of yoga for balance is that the positions also provide emotional benefits. 

They are useful for relieving stress, reducing tension, and fatigue. 

These Yoga postures also help improve your focus, concentration, and memory.

Indeed, balance is not only physical but also emotional. 

Sometimes life seems so hectic and out of control that the result is to be “out of balance”. 

The relaxation you experience during and after yoga classes helps bring awareness and balance to your life off the mat. 

For this reason, it is very important that you observe what happens in your mind during a balance position: if your mind is calm, the practice will also be calm and stable; if your mind is turbulent, the practice will also suffer the swings of the mind.

Why use Yoga to improve balance?

Exercises that require coordination of movements, such as some yoga postures, helps us train for balance, an ability that is closely related to the inner ear, where the vestibular apparatus or posterior labyrinth is located, which, among other functions, gives information to the brain about our body posture and spatial position.

The right Yoga position prevents us from suffering alterations such as vertigo, a disorder that causes dizziness, instability, a feeling that everything revolves around us… 

Also, as with the practice of other sports, these positions help to increase blood flow of the ear and eliminate stress, which in many cases is one of the causes of hearing problems.

The three pillars of balance

Your ability to stay balanced depends on three functions of the nervous system. They work closely together, on and off the yoga mat.

I’m talking about the vestibular system of the inner ear, the sense of sight, and proprioception. These three govern, respectively, spatial, visual, and sensory perception. Together, they help maintain balance. 

The sensory, spatial, and visual information that reaches the brain through the senses makes it possible to maintain balance, that is, the ability to stay in an upright position and to move without falling to the ground.

What does all this have to do with yoga?

Yogis long ago discovered that the ability to execute a balancing pose is highly dependent on a mental state.

The more agitation there is in your thoughts, the less able you are to achieve or maintain a balanced posture.

Of the three mechanisms explained above, the sensory one is the one that you can exert the greatest influence on with the practice of yoga. 

When you pay attention to your physical sensations, you broaden your perception of the body and gain poise.

This leads to a more serene state of mind, with consequent positive results for balance.

All yoga practice is focused on awakening body awareness, that is, proprioception. 

One of the most frequently used guidelines is to focus on breathing, that is, on the physical sensation of breathing.

It is a way of awakening and expanding your bodily feeling.