Improving Your Balance

Along with leg strength and power comes balance. In the previous posts you have learned how important lower body strength is for creating “Rock Solid” stances and “Generating Maximum Striking Power” In this post I’d like to talk about improving overall lower body balance. Without proper balance we lose power in our strikes as well as reduce our ability to have strong solid stances. When we can control our balance throughout our movements we will be in a position to dominate our opponent.

In the course of our Martial Art training workouts we sometimes lose our balance. And, as you probably already know from experience this generally put us “out of position” to deliver maximum power in our strikes. In fact, as a martial artist, your opponent is doing everything he can to take your balance! Early on in my training I was interested in how easy it was to take some ones balance in training. I enjoyed pulling my training partner off his balance or putting him in a position where he couldn’t deliver his strike effectively. I became driven to discover how this worked. I discovered that depending on how we are built, i.e., our height and our weight distribution determine where our center of balance is located.

I have learned that the lower my center of balance is, the harder it is for my opponent to take it from me. The best way to lower your center of balance in general is to make your lower body heavier than your upper body. Now with most people that is normally the case. We tend to carry more of our weight below the torso but you can improve upon this by building more muscle in your lower body. As your lower body mass increases, your center of gravity becomes lower.

Another way to lower your center of gravity is to work in lower stances to improve your balance. If your Art works out of “horse stances” try and spread your legs out even farther and deeper into your stances and try and stay there for up to a minute in each stance. This will not only increase your leg strength over time it will also accustom you to having balance in these positions and to lower your center of gravity.

I have another exercise that I do regularly that can help you to increase your balance and lower your center of gravity. Give it a try!

Follow the link below to see a 4.81 megabyte instructional video that will show this simple exercise technique.

http://www.goldenwolfe.com/kungfu/secrets/video/example7.html

Good Luck!

Tony