Balance

Traditionally balance is described by maintaining position using three interfaces: your inner ear, vision, and proprioception. The latter term means position sense in space. These three elements provide information regarding where we are in our environment and how to respond to it. One aspect of balance that is often not mentioned is our guts. Largely a giant water balloon that sloshes around with every movement we make, providing both a mechanism for force production and internal chaos that must be managed.

Manipulating our center of gravity requires precision effort and an ability to alter our shape. When we take a step, the guts in our abdomen are slightly delayed in their response to our movement. In essence, they move in opposition for a period. This creates turbulence and could throw us off balance if we are unable to accommodate. The accommodation looks like a literal shape change. Imagine for a minute that you are taking a boiling pot of spaghetti noodles off the stove and over to the sink for draining. When you turn from the stove toward the sink the water and the noodles turn in the opposite direction. If you turn too quickly, they slosh up the opposite side of the pot and could potentially run over the edge burning your hand. However, if you do turn too quickly but change your position to catch the turbulent contents of the pot, you save your skin from a nasty burn. The former might be similar to avoiding a defender on the football field or bending down too fast to catch a rushing grandchild. The spaghetti noodles win.

Unlike the pot on the stove, we are able to physically contort our bodies to catch our guts and use their contents (water) as hydraulic leverage to absorb or create forces. The movements we make slosh our guts around, press them against muscles, bones, connective tissues and deform them. That deformation is like a rubber band, storing the energy from the movement and releasing it once the guts have moved. Due to their water content, they are relatively incompressible, but the tissues containing them are compressible and stretchy. Those characteristics allow for efficient movement. Imagine your pelvis like a clay bowl, it can morph into any shape you want to house your guts, however if they spill over the edge a compensation most likely develops and/or we lose our balance.

Balance has a large sensory component, it requires your ears, eyes and tissues. They provide raw information about the local environment. Using that information to move your body via the hydraulic lift that sits at the deepest interior provides the efficient strategies we need to operate within the world. Lose control of those operations, and things get dicey quickly.

Austin Ulrich, Physical Therapist