How to Improve Balance With Yoga and Pilates

Good balance isn’t just necessary for day-to-day movements like walking and standing, it’s also a key part of your overall fitness. Whether you want to get the most out of yoga practice, build strength or improve mobility after an injury – good balance contributes to it all. That’s why FS8 heroes a hybrid 3-in-1 workout concept using pilates, tone and yoga to incorporate all parts of the body. Whole body workouts get each part of your body moving to help with alignment and balance. Meanwhile, with our group training model, you can get your sweat on alongside a community of like-minded people. We’ve put together this article to teach you how to improve balance through exercise and discover the difference it can make to your everyday life.

Why is balance important?

Balance exercises can provide many benefits to your everyday life by contributing to postural stability and better control through movement – and who doesn’t want that? Building good balance can help improve physical elements like:

• Coordination
• Strength
• Flexibility
• Mobility

Beyond the physical benefits of good balance, other parts of your body can reap the benefits of improving your balance too, like vision, cognition, and inner ear issues. Let’s unpack some key ways to improve balance.

Our favourite ways to improve balance

So why are FS8 workouts so great at helping to improve balance? Our classes champion a functional exercise style because it has real impact on how you move about in your daily life. By building strength and balance through exercises that mimic how you move in your life outside the gym, your workouts become a part of your holistic wellbeing.

Some of our favourite exercises to improve balance come from pilates and yoga principals, so our Hybrid and Restore classes are perfect for this goal. If you hear yoga and expect to relax, think again – we push yoga and pilates to the limit with low impact, high intensity training. Here’s how pilates and yoga can help improve balance.

Pilates for balance

Pilates can have an array of benefits for your body, including helping to improve balance – read our guide to ‘What Does Pilates Do for Your Body’ to learn more. Because of its focus on whole body alignment, pilates can help strengthen key muscle groups that assist with balance – like your core, back, and hips. Pilates incorporates elements of stability, coordination, and strength, while a reformer bed adds resistance into the mix. These exercise elements can have a big impact on improving your balance. At FS8 we’ve blended traditional pilates moves with innovative, high intensity exercises that everyone can benefit from. Our Hybrid classes are great balance workouts that combine cardio with resistance training for total body conditioning.

Yoga for balance

Yoga focusses on core strength and stability, so it goes hand in hand with building better balance – most yoga poses require unifying the body and mobilising multiple muscle groups. FS8 Restore are yoga inspired classes where we encourage you to hold a pose for a period of 3-5 deep breaths, so you can really test your balancing abilities. To help get the most out of your yoga practice, it can be helpful to incorporate breathwork and Drishti (centring your gaze on a focal point).

• Breathwork for balance: When holding a yoga pose, make sure you’re taking deep breaths in through the nose, and releasing them out through the mouth or nose. When moving between poses, control your breathing and move in fluid motions that match the rhythm of your breaths.
• Drishti for balance: Our eyes play a big part in helping to maintain balance, so it can be useful to settle your gaze on fixed point. This is called Drishti and can help enhance concentration and invoke a meditative state, which is important when practicing yoga to improve balance.

Exercises to improve balance

Our group fitness training model makes it easy to adjust difficulty and tailor exercises to your needs. Plus, it’s always helpful to have a trainer present. You can also continue your balance exercises outside of the gym to stay consistent and see improvements. We’ve compiled a list of our favourite exercises to improve balance that you can do at home.

• Single leg balance exercises: A simple beginner move to start practicing balance. Stand with your feet together and your knees slightly bent, raise one leg until your thigh is in parallel to the floor and hold the position for 30 seconds before repeating with the other leg.
• Corkscrew: A pilates move involving lying down with your knees bent and feet flat on the ground. Extend your legs upwards until your toes are pointing to the roof, then engage your core and use your hips to make small circular motions with your feet.
• Chair pose: A standing yoga position. Keep your feet together and slowly bring your hips backwards with your weight shifted into your heels. Tuck your tail bone in and activate your core, bring your arms out to be parallel to your ears and hold the pose for five deep breaths.