Body Awareness: Endurance and Balance

Woman Doing Endurance Activity for Body Awareness

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Grasping the concept of body awareness is a part of increasing your overall wellness. While mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects are a portion of body awareness, we’ll address physical awareness here.

It’s common for us to easily notice our bodies and the visual aspects that we use as judgement for our health. However, there’s much more to body awareness than simply noting your appearance, weight, or physique. It’s vital to listen to your body. This information is important for each of us to understand to advocate for overall wellness.

Let’s look at some areas that are necessary to grasp for a more complete awareness of your physical being.

In This Article

Focus of Body Awareness

Strength and endurance are two normal areas of physical training. However, for overall focus, it’s important to consider flexibility and balance as well. A greater understanding of all four areas creates better results for body awareness.

We’ll look at an overview of these four points. Then, we’ll highlight endurance and balance in depth. The other two areas are covered in an article on strength and flexibility.

Each focus has its own benefits, examples, and may have limitations based on illness, injury, or chronic issues. Another important point to note is that the ideas behind body awareness overlap and are more beneficial when utilized together.

Endurance

Endurance involves action with your body for longer periods of time, for farther distances, or for greater duration with resistance. Described in its most basic form, endurance allows an increase in activity tolerance.

There are two body systems that are highlighted when considering endurance. The circulatory and the respiratory systems; your heart and lungs.

Balance

Another focus of body awareness is balance. Much like flexibility, attention to balance is often reserved for older individuals or only when difficulties arise. It’s important to give attention to balance prior to this point and to maintain a focus on balance as part of your whole being.

Addressing balance before you feel pressed to need correction helps your body stay prepared if an issue arises. Also, it promotes greater safety when you’re functioning in challenging movement realms. It’s good to stay sharp with higher level balance tasks.

Strength

Strength is based on force, energy and load pertaining to your muscles. The musculoskeletal system has its own structure including bones and the attached muscles. This allows the movements of your body.

Although muscles are made up of fibers which create ability to withstand force, create energy, and tolerate load, there are many aspects that go into building and maintaining strength.

Specific muscle groups increase strength in each area and help us stay fit. So, it’s good to understand strengthening to promote a greater impact on your body as a whole.

Flexibility

A portion of body awareness that often gets overlooked is flexibility. You might have been taught to stretch before and after exercising. But there’s more to flexibility than warmups and cool downs.

It’s important to be intentional when increasing flexibility. Rather than only use it as a focus around activity, begin to view it as part of overall health. Flexibility promotes increasing and maintaining normal movements. Strengthening coupled with flexibility helps maximize your musculoskeletal system for everyday use and when exerting extra force.

Person Swimming for Endurance

Overview of Endurance

As mentioned, endurance is a type of activity that enhances focus of the circulatory and respiratory systems. While it also includes the musculoskeletal system, working the heart and lungs brings a different dynamic to wellness than only resistance training.

Endurance activity is often called “cardio.” This is due to the involvement of the heart and increase in pumping that creates greater blood flow. There are a variety of types of cardio, or endurance training, that often get categorized under the term cardio. We’ll look at these later.

Benefits of Endurance

The heart and lungs are two body systems that are involuntary. They work without you thinking about them. You don’t have to spend time reminding yourself to breathe or pump your heart. Instead, as your heart works, blood is sent into the lungs to get oxygenated. Next, it is pumped throughout your body while delivering oxygen. This rich blood moves into your tissues, and even brings life to your muscles.

This movement is vital in your daily routine and specific to maintaining the actions that keep you alive. It’s important to stay healthy and focus on wellness for these areas of your body. One way to do this is by increasing your endurance. This effort creates greater capacity in your circulatory and respiratory systems.

Not only does this benefit you by increasing your health, but it also allows better recovery with an illness or injury. Taking care of these systems gives you higher activity tolerance which promotes better movement, greater efforts with strengthening, and overall ability to maintain longer or higher intensity activities. In short, it helps your breathing and heart performance.

Regular endurance training, three times a week, is recommended for improved outcomes with tolerance of distance and duration. Intentional planning helps promote time for this activity.

Examples of Endurance

We’ll look at two different categories when considering types of endurance. These are intensity and impact.

Intensity is determined by the amount of exertion that is involved. It is most easily measured by your heart rate. Intensity is classified as low, medium, or high. Usually, low intensity involves a cardiac workout that increases your heart rate but for a longer duration. This type of endurance training promotes greater stamina for longer distances or prolonged time such as with marathons. Medium and high intensity endurance programs are done in shorter bursts as they get progressively more involved.

An example of low intensity endurance training could be running at slower speeds for longer distances. Other examples are walking, swimming, and dancing. Medium to high impact activities also include running but at greater speeds for a shorter distance. Other examples are aerobics, cycling, jump roping, climbing stairs, and speed walking. An important point to understand is that as you enter a higher intensity category, you may be using shorter periods of time for an activity. This promotes max heart rate and allows short recovery intervals.

Impact refers to the amount of stress put on the body during movements. Lower impact activities involve less jarring of the joints. As impact progresses from medium to high, there is more wear and tear on the muscles, bones, and joints.

While intensity can be a more challenging measure, impact is usually easier to grasp. Think of any endurance movement you perform. Depending on how heavily you push off, land, or make contact determines your level of impact.

Examples of low impact are walking, biking, and swimming. Medium to high impact activities include running, stair climbing, and any type of jumping such as rope or frog leaps.

Limitations of Endurance

With endurance activities, many types of heart, breathing, muscle, or joint issue can cause limitations to your ability. It can be difficult, but it’s important to understand ways to create greater endurance even with health challenges.

When considering your goals, one important view is to realize that there are multiple ways to mix intensity with impact. For example, if you have joint integrity limitations, you can still perform high intensity cardio by swimming or even biking depending on the area of the body involved. In fact, swimming is one of the most beneficial endurance and strengthening activities due to its low impact nature.

If limitations prohibit you from medium or high intensity movements, a lower-level intensity activity is still better than only slow or no movement. Walking is a great example. Remember, you can perform lower intensity for a longer period to improve overall endurance.

It’s often easier to assume you cannot participate in endurance training, but there are combinations of activities that you could likely consider rather than skipping altogether. It’s also important when trying to heal the body physically.

In addition, if you suspect an issue, it’s important to have it addressed. Know your body. Advocate. Medical gaslighting is a common complaint that can be avoided by being proactive.

Person Standing on Disc for Balance and Body Awareness

Overview of Balance

As mentioned earlier, balance is an important part of body awareness that often gets overlooked. More than strength, endurance, and even flexibility, balance is usually addressed only when there is a problem. Yet several aspects of daily life are affected by balance.

A good point to remember is that balance is perceived by your brain, but input is provided by your body. So, balance includes positioning of your feet, ankles, knees, and even your hips. Certain angles can throw balance off very quickly. Something as minimal as an ankle sprain can change your entire balance perception. In addition, deficits with vision and hearing can create balance challenges as well.

With this knowledge, we realize that it’s important to maintain a focus on your balance before you have a deficit.

Benefits of Balance

It’s true that balance becomes more of a challenge with aging due to changes in the brain. But since it is also affected by weakness or decreased joint integrity throughout the legs, we should focus on better strengthening, endurance, and flexibility. These areas are incorporated to promote better balance.

Health benefits associated with balance are safety awareness, better righting reactions, and lower fall risks. These are important for everyone but especially with the elderly population.

Keeping optimal balance promotes ease when performing a variety of tasks such as changing directions, stair climbing, pivoting, climbing a ladder, using a stepstool, and reaching overhead or behind you.

Other activities that you may not realize include balance are dressing, showering, carrying objects, cooking, and almost any activity in standing.

Examples of Balance Activities

We’ve established the importance of maintaining good balance, so let’s look at some ideas to accomplish this.

Progressive balance activities are a great way to increase your safety and balance abilities. The easiest way to think of this is practicing activities that challenges your balance and adding more difficult tasks as you progress. For example, if you can stand with your feet close together and close your eyes with no problem, try standing on one leg. If that’s easy, try closing your eyes while standing on one leg.

Higher level balance tasks can include anything that changes the input in a scenario. If you think standing on a hard surface is easy, try balancing on an incline. If that isn’t difficult, try standing on foam or a soft rather than firm surface. Close your eyes to decrease the input to your brain. If that’s still easy, try standing on an unsteady surface while using small weights in your hands for resistance repetitions of any exercise on your arms.

Any type of activity that involves movements with a smaller base or a less sturdy foundation is challenging your balance. In addition, there are programs for improving balance and body awareness. Yoga is great for balance as is Tai Chi.

Tai Chi is specifically designed to increase center of gravity and uses fluid movements. Performed at slow speed, Tai Chi is a wonderful activity to work on balance safely. This is true even for those with minimal deficits.

Limitations of Balance

There are several illnesses that might hinder your balance. But various situations within your body systems can also create balance challenges.

One is decreased proprioception. This creates difficulties with your balance because proprioception is understanding where you are in space. Basically, judging where your body is and what it’s doing during movements. A confusion of this input alters your balance.

In addition, lack of muscle strength is a contributor to loss of balance. With a decrease in strength, and joint integrity, your body changes when righting reactions are required. It becomes harder to quickly react to a balance loss or stumble for example.

Another cause of decreased balance is visual impairments. This can even include a minimal change in vision. Remember we addressed input that enters the brain to process balance? If your eyesight changes, or is impaired, it can hinder the ability of your brain to give correct feedback for balance. This is also why closing your eyes creates a good challenge when working on balance activities.

Finally, we’ll look at vestibular involvement. This affects many elderly people but can be a problem at any age. The vestibular system may be affected by injury, infection, medication, or aging.

When an issue occurs, you usually feel dizziness, unsteadiness, or can have vertigo. It might even be as severe as having dizziness while laying down. A doctor can prescribe medication to help tolerate this situation, but it’s also beneficial to see a specialist. They can help you with vestibular exercises. These include head and neck positioning with visual tracking. This situation is rarely remedied quickly. It takes time while addressing these exercises to see results.

Final Thoughts on Awareness of Endurance and Balance

We looked at an overview of four areas of activity for improved body wellness. In this content, we covered two of these. Endurance and balance.

It’s important to remember that both play a role in increasing your physical health and body awareness. You shouldn’t address endurance without attention to balance. Nor should you address only balance without increasing your endurance.

Endurance improves your cardiac and respiratory systems. Balance improves your safety. Together they allow better health for activities and a foundation to increase your lifelong wellness.

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