“Try something that’s a little difficult, a little out of your comfort zone, and you’ll get better and better each day.”
Even incredible feats like 10K runs and half marathons do not have a high demand for advanced balance skills, so throwing in some basic workouts and integrating them into your fitness routine in order to hone your balancing skills is a key fitness strategy for anti-aging, one that will be discussed in detail in this episode. Since these exercises aren’t time-consuming or strenuous, they don’t interfere with the energy expenditure that you put out towards other goals/endeavors, and while they are challenging, they’re also super fun to do, especially because they give you the opportunity to strive towards getting better at something. For example, if you’re one of those people who often hoists a heavy bar and is putting a lot of weight on your back, why don’t you try putting one leg on an elevated surface (the Bulgarian split squat) and squatting down on a single leg without even adding any weight at all? Just simply performing that move for let’s say, 12 reps….you might even be sore the next day! I’ve experienced this myself—performing a nice set of squats with heavy weight, but then after switching over to one leg squats, well, all bets are off! But building new skills is important—especially your ability to do exercises one leg at a time, because most athletic/fitness and everyday activities are performed one leg at a time (walking, running, jumping). 
In contrast, a lot of stuff we do in daily life (athletic, fitness, even work related) is done with two arms at a time—we lift things with two hands, we carry things frequently with two hands, but one leg at a time seems to be the prevailing athletic and fitness endeavor—however we don’t work at one leg at a time too often. If you look through my Morning Routine online course, you’ll see I have included some interesting balancing challenges in there, and it’s kind of fun to reflect on what I’ve noticed from a daily practice of doing exercises—I am getting a tiny bit better, but when I step on that soft 2.5 inch pad and try to balance on one leg for a count of 60, while it’s not stenegous to my muscles, I’ve realized it’s much more of a challenge to the brain. Whenever I step off, I feel a sense of central nervous system fatigue from simply concentrating so hard! So giving your brain a little challenge like this is super helpful, and I would contend, translates directly to all manner of not only fitness endeavors, but cognitive endeavors too. There is a huge need for an emphasis on balance training in fitness—just see this Dr. Luks article about the importance of balance training and why, for the elderly, each fall becomes progressively harder to recover from—as scary as it sounds, sadly 50% of people who fall die within a year of suffering a hip fracture. So minimizing our risk of falling is an integral healthy aging practice, especially as it helps dramatically accelerate both the speed and success of our recovery, if we do end up falling—because we head into an unfortunate situation fully loaded with all the positive, helpful attributes that can help us, instead of going into something with frailty. And interestingly, as I mentioned in the previous show, the senior citizen age group has the highest rate of improvement from strength training than any other age group! 
When you have a great commitment to health and fitness in your young years and decades, you will induce epigenetic changes that will affect your lifespan, according to Dr. Luks. So an athletic youth spent building muscle mass, doing explosive efforts and working on balance, will imprint into your genes that you are an athletic person, and you will hold onto these attributes—even if you slip and fall off as you get older. Once it’s time to turn it back on and return to the gym, court, etc, you'll be much more adaptable. And of course, exercise leads to some of these genes being turned on, and som