A Science of Healthy Balance: Why We Need One - What It Might Look Like

By George Locker

More and more older adults are falling, having trouble walking or standing, or limiting their activities because of compromised balance and fear of falling. There is an epidemic of falling among seniors, which results in a great deal of serious injury and death. Medicine has been unable to prevent balance loss or restore healthy balance. Why are so many people falling? This book is an original, groundbreaking, and long-overdue description of "healthy balance" as a science and as a practical life activity. This fascinating discussion of balance is told from the perspective of a practitioner of Taijiquan, the Chinese martial art. He began his studies as a young man and is now a senior citizen with superb balance and stability. What is balance? How do people stand? Why does healthy balance often turn into unhealthy balance? What does conventional medicine say about balance? In what ways does medicine get balance all wrong? Why should balance be treated as a science instead of a neglected backwater of healthcare? What would a science of healthy balance look like? This book is intended for the healthcare industry, which gets balance all wrong, and for any person who wants to maintain healthy balance throughout life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798350906714

Book preview

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©2023 All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Print ISBN: 979-8-35090-670-7

eBook ISBN: 979-8-35090-671-4

Table of Contents

Dedication

Appreciation

Preface

A Science of Healthy Balance

1. Humans Have Superb Balance

2. The Legs and Health

3. Standing on One Leg

4. Isaac Newton: The Science of Balance

5. Vladimir Janda: The Postural Muscles

6. Gaining, Maintaining, and Losing Healthy Balance

7. Toward a New Definition of Healthy Balance

Without a Science of Healthy Balance

8. How Balance Is Commonly Misdefined

9. How Medicine Misdefines Balance

The Epidemic of Falling

10. The Epidemic

11. How Medicine Responds to Falling

12. How the CDC Responds to Falling

13. Toward a New Way to Respond to Falling

Healthy Balance Self-Help

14. Weight-Bearing Sports and Exercises

15. Enjoy a Lifetime of Healthy Balance

Falling Is Not an Option: A Way to Lifelong Balance

(BookBaby Press 2020)

Video of Postural Retraining™Method and Fifteen Exercises

Dedication

To our extraordinary teacher of thirty-three years, Yu Cheng-Hsiang (1929 – 2010), Grand Master of Taijiquan , ¹ who showed us another world. His mastery of form, breathtaking application, constant refinement, and dedication to teaching, were rightfully legendary.

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1 Taijiquan is the modern English language phonetic spelling that replaced the more familiar T’ai Chi Chuan, or T’ai Chi for short. Either spelling represents how the Chinese characters translated as Great Ultimate Fist are pronounced in Chinese.

Appreciation

A big thank you to the contributing editors: Arthur Castle, my friend of fifty years, and Bruce Esrig, my Taijiquan classmate and old friend. Their feedback brought many expressed and unexpressed ideas to life on the page.

Preface

This is a book about healthy balance - what it is, how to maintain it, and why people lose it. By healthy balance , I mean a person’s innate ability to stand and move easily without hesitation or fear of falling. I use the word healthy to emphasize that from age one to at least age sixty-five, most people balance without a second thought. For much of life, healthy balance is the normal state.

Healthy balance can and should be the normal state for an entire lifetime. When this innate capacity visibly diminishes in an individual - and it happens to millions - they are said to be declining. What causes healthy balance to slowly change into unhealthy balance, when a person’s ability to stand and move easily diminishes for no apparent medical reason? From that point forward, unhealthy balance becomes the new normal.

Given that each year more than thirty-six million older adults report falling, it might be tempting to think of unhealthy balance as an inevitable decline associated with aging. Notwithstanding the high numbers, the idea that falling is a natural part of a long life simply is not true.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Council on Aging both state without qualification that falling is not a normal part of aging.² That is my experience and my belief. But if aging is not the cause of so much falling, then what is the cause? Neither organization appears to ask or answer this question.

For me, maintaining healthy balance into old age did not start as a specific goal; it emerged from an athletic pursuit. I spent many years studying Taijiquan as a martial art with an amazing teacher, plus I practiced a lot, and I continue to. As would be true for any long-term and diligent practitioner of Taijiquan, my balance and stability at age seventy-three are far better than they were at twenty-seven. Taijiquan is my credential and widespread falling is my motivation for writing about a science of healthy balance.

Considering the high chance of a serious fall in later life, the loss of healthy balance might be the most neglected and poorly understood aspect of personal care and well-being. Why has this happened? As I came to learn, there is a chasm between how medicine and academia explain healthy human balance - both as a physical act and as