A Note from the Author

I’ve been teaching balance (and learning how to) on and off for the last 7 years. But even before that I had a vague understanding of balance.

While I was in the army I was posted to Bavaria, to a ski Chalet would you believe, where I had the chance to do some cross country skiing and on occasion teach it.

Learning to get up hills, I figured out that I’d get the best grip by centering my weight over the pocket that contained the wax. This was in part garnered from my study of dynamics, which I was doing in my spare time since I’d quit school before graduating to join the army.

(The chief instructor, who hadn’t studied Dynamics, at least as far as I am aware, told me to learn forward for better grip. This in fact shifted my center of gravity ahead of the wax pocket and reduced the grip.)

Despite that insight into balance my understanding was limited in other situations such as cornering while riding a bicycle or motorbike (or even cornering while speedskating.)

It took me a long time to learn how to align my bikes center, my own center and the bike’s point of contact with the earth (call it the foundation) with the forces that were acting on us.

As an example, going down a hill that a friend and I used to ride regularly, I could never get used to the idea of leaning into the turn. The fear of falling out of the turn (or into it) I carried into speed skating. Once I got past a certain speed I would get scared and it was only learning how to feel balance and understand it, and learning how to practice, that has enabled me to gradually get better at cornering.

I believe that one of the reasons that I enjoy teaching balance is that it offers a window into learning to better feel the body and control it. It is a gateway into improving proprioception, kinaesthetic awareness or simply “feeling the body.”

Plus, very few people seem to understand it very well, or they understand how to balance but not how to teach it.

(As a case in point, many of the comments I get for a youtube video include thank you’s because no one else explains it as well as I do (at least not on youtube!))

The nice thing is, that with an understanding of balance, it becomes easier to teach it and learn it. It’s not actually that difficult to learn.

And the beauty of it is that the same principles of balance can be applied whether balancing on the hands or the feet or the top of the head.