What Do We Mean by Balance?
When most people hear the word balance, they think of it in one narrow sense: not falling over. In reality, balance has many different meanings, and if we want people to move well across a lifetime, we need to acknowledge all of them.
In everyday conversation, balance might mean work–life balance. In exercise science, it might mean a “balanced body,” free of muscular imbalances such as those described by Vladimir Janda in his upper- and lower-crossed syndromes (Janda, 1983). In sports performance, it often refers to strength ratios between opposing muscle groups, or left–right symmetry in tasks like sprinting and jumping.
In movement science and rehabilitation, balance usually refers to at least three related but distinct concepts:
Postural orientation and equilibrium – the ability to maintain the body’s centre of mass over its base of support in gravity (Horak & Macpherson, 1996). This “equilibrioception” is critical for everyday mobility and declines are strongly linked with fall risk in older adults (Montero-Odasso et al., 2012).
Dynamic/reactive balance – the capacity to adapt to perturbations, such as recovering after being jostled in a crowd. This involves anticipatory and compensatory postural adjustments that are vital for fall resilience (Santos et al., 2010).
Coordination of posture with external loads or objects – for example, carrying a tray through a crowded restaurant or balancing a dowel in the hand while walking. Researchers studying this phenomenon use terms like manual–postural coordination (Rinaldi & Monaco, 2013) or load carriage stability (Birrell & Haslam, 2009).
At Nature Moves and WildStrong, we design activities that touch on all of these layers of balance. A simple broomstick game, for example, asks participants to balance a stick upright on their palm while walking around obstacles. This engages equilibrioception, coordination, and reactive adjustments, while also adding laughter and play.
This broader view contrasts with approaches that emphasise a narrow set of gym-based outcomes. For instance, strength sports like powerlifting deliberately target three or four lifts (squat, deadlift, bench press, overhead press), and hypertrophy training often isolates muscle groups. These methods are effective for their purposes, but research on task specificity shows that performance gains in isolated exercises do not automatically transfer to more complex motor skills or everyday adaptability (Davids et al., 2015; Morrison, 2024). A lifter may gain strength yet still struggle with novel coordinative challenges, such as reactive balance games, because these require different information–movement couplings.
A richer approach to balance means designing experiences that reflect its many forms: internal symmetry, vestibular awareness, reactivity, and coordination with objects. Not only does this align with ecological views of how skills are acquired, but it also better reflects the demands of real life; unpredictable, dynamic, and social.
In the next article, we’ll move from these definitions of balance to how they show up in practice, in complex, representative tasks like games and obstacle courses that demand attention, adaptability, and creativity.
Later in the series, we’ll return to the idea of dual tasking to explore why it has become such a popular research model, and how it compares to these richer, real-world challenges.