BOOMERS LOSING BALANCE

Cobblestones. LARGE cobblestones. These rounded mounds, like small islands floating in concrete, paved the Savannah, GA riverfront. My husband, son and I navigated this historic city's sidewalks this past week. We wore our sneakers and walked and walked ... and walked. During an evening ghost tour, we couldn't decide which was scarier - the ghosts of the yellow fever victims who were buried alive in 1820, or the equally old walkways beneath our feet.

Well, a balancing act it became. Our son would claim we never did find our footing as our feet repeatedly rolled to the sides of cobblestones. He laughed several times when our sneakered toes caught the elevated edges of the cement sidewalk panels. No one laughed, though, when my husband looked up at an ornate cast iron balcony and then stumbled off the deeply depressed curb side. In seconds, his 6'2" frame draped across the feet of a couple licking their ice cream cones. Some minor ankle soreness and a broken camera were the only casualties, thank goodness. It could have been so much worse.

You see, my husband and I are baby boomers. Both in our fifties, we have decades of old sports injuries and plenty of normal wear and tear. We also don't look where we are going. My husband's knees and ankles, despite regular exercise, have the stability of the Georgia taffy we watched droop and twist as the candy machine pulled it. His connective tissue doesn't connect well anymore. This issue continually challenges his balance. Flash forward twenty years, and that fall could have retired him permanently.

Balance is a buzz word in fitness today. Defined as "the process by which we control the body's center of mass with respect to the base of support, whether it is stationary or moving" (Rose, 2003), balance is vital to wellness and independence, especially in our later years. The core - the muscles of the abdomen and back that form your body's "corset" - have become the celebrity muscles on the fitness stage. Their strength is essential for balance. This muscle girdle keeps the upper and lower body from teetering like a tall stack of dishes might do while resting on a waiter's elevated, upturned palm.

There has to be more to it than that, though, because my husband exercises his core religiously. Well, there is. Several body systems contribute to overall balance, and they are all adept at compensating for each other when a team player is sidelined. But there are limits. The sensory systems - visual, somatosensory (spacial location and movement of the body relative to the support surface), and vestibular (inner ear) gather information from the surrounding environment and from our own actions within it. From this info, our body (or motor system) responds both consciously and subconsciously to keep our balancing act together - or not.

With wear and tear, age or disease, one or more of these systems may become impaired. The interaction between these systems then becomes suboptimal. So, they help each other out. But like the average family, dysfunctional members can and do exist. The interdependency of the family members is complex, but it does have its limitations. If more than one sensory system is compromised or the body's motor system response is poor, significant balance issues will result.

My husband's body collapsed like a marionette puppet on loose strings because his visual sensory system (looking up instead of at the cobblestones beneath his feet) and his responding motor system (his poor leg and ankle strength) didn't perform optimally. Balance was threatened and down he went.

So what does that mean for him and other baby boomers like him? As a trainer, I would first assess an individual's systems and identify where the weaknesses exist. Vision and inner ear problems are the territory of other specialists and would need to be addressed. My expertise is with the motor system - the body's musculoskeletal strength and endurance. Overall muscle strengthening through resistance exercise is essential. But I can also emphasize strengthening areas of weakness, like the knees and ankles. In my husband's case, surgery has been suggested by an orthopedic surgeon to repair his damaged connective tissue. In the interim, however, maximizing his hip, leg and ankle strength would help him now AND later during recovery from any future surgery. For those who just need to tweak their strength, exercises using weights or resistance bands is essential. The muscles and connective tissue need to be stressed enough in order to strengthen. As to which muscles should be worked, the answer is ALL of them, and at least twice a week. If you can perform an assessment on yourself or hire a professional to do one, all the better. A road map can help when you don't know your way.

There are many systems at work within your body helping it to stay upright, especially when the terrain beneath you abruptly changes. The body is an amazing machine as it gathers information and miraculously performs, even with deficits. But all of that accumulated use from living a long life can wreck havoc if you don't maintain those systems. Exercise, once again, is a nonnegotiable. It is within your control to optimize your body's mechanics. Today, it may just be a camera that shatters. Tomorrow, it could be a body part.