Cycling UK Forum

I am reading an article on balance:

1 - Lift one leg of the ground

2 - Hold until you have to stop.

Helpfully they say average time in seconds for 18 - 59 is 42 secs and 10 secs less for each succeeding decade.You will find this dead easy.Now try it shutting your eyes.

How did you do.
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I ride Brompton,Hetchins 531

I could read a book with my eyes open for minutes.
Eyes closed.Wobble quickly.Difficult.
Any good idea's to improve.? I am sure cycling helps maintain balance.

briansnail wrote: ↑5 Jul 2024, 4:14pm ...
Any good idea's to improve.?
...

Yes: practice, both with eyes open and closed.

As you said it tends to deteriorate with age. But the rate isn't inevitable.

Jonathan

I do a lot of yoga and was very strong on the balance postures. Not anymore. There was a noticeable drop in performance after I broke my leg, but on both sides, not just the wonky leg side.

It has been suggested to me that general anaesthetics can have long term side effects on balance. I am of course also two years older.......

tenbikes wrote: ↑5 Jul 2024, 4:49pm I do a lot of yoga and was very strong on the balance postures. Not anymore. There was a noticeable drop in performance after I broke my leg, but on both sides, not just the wonky leg side.

It has been suggested to me that general anaesthetics can have long term side effects on balance. I am of course also two years older.......

I would guess that you lost a lot of strength in many muscles, not just the ones directly related to your fracture; thus affecting your balance.
(I'm only basing this on when I broke BOTH my legs, so take with a pinch of salt!)
I predict you'll get most of it back in time, if you keep doing appropriate exercises. Fingers crossed for you that it's NOT an anesthetic issue.

This is my hope too, but it has been a year plus and despite two of three classes a week, plus biking , it isn't improving yet.....

When I was in the Scouts, many years ago, the Scoutmaster used to have us all stand on one leg, arms folded and eyes closed. I was the last boy standing.
Now, after many general anaesthetics, and with one duff leg, I was prompted by this post to try this feat.
I can still do it, (on the good leg!) and only general feebleness would curtail the exercise.
But closing my eyes made me put my foot down, as a fall might be nasty, and I was losing balance.
My good sense of balance was great for rock climbing.

I do an eyes closed one leg stands as part of a warm up before a run, as it has a lot of quick changes for all the muscles down there!
Practice certainly helps, I often need two or three tries to get in to "the zone" but once there can typically hold it fairly well, up past a minute (I'm 57).

Pete.

Wasn’t the stand on one leg, eyes closed, for 3 minutes a second war air crew test?
I never used to understand the difficulty, up until maybe 60 years of age. At 77 I can no more do it than fly about in the air. I’m not so keen on ladder work now, either.
As I understand it, you get hair cells in the cochlea which sense the vibration of a membrane and we “hear” this as different pitch sound. Very similar hair cells sense the movement of fluid in the semicircular canals so that we can balance. We more or less expect our hearing to deteriorate, why are we surprised when our balance deteriorates?
I don’t really practice balancing apart from putting on my trousers standing up. ….but I remember when I used to get out of the car and put on my walking socks ( remember them?) and boots standing up… now out of the question!

531colin is correct, our sense of balance tends to deteriorate with age, but practice really does have capacity to reverse that trend. The late Dr Michael Mosley did a great 'Just one thing' podcast on just that:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000w3lh

Cyclothesist wrote: ↑6 Jul 2024, 2:24pm 531colin is correct, our sense of balance tends to deteriorate with age, but practice really does have capacity to reverse that trend. The late Dr Michael Mosley did a great 'Just one thing' podcast on just that:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000w3lh

There is a great deal of “redundancy” in the system, ie. lots of hair cells “sleeping” in young people.
Practice balancing recruits these cells into use, substituting for dead cells.

531colin is correct, our sense of balance tends to deteriorate with age

Does this mean if older folk cycled on a level football playing field with shut their eyes.They would likely crash?
Just curious as ability to balance seems to heavily depend on sensory eye input.

briansnail wrote: ↑8 Jul 2024, 12:53pm

531colin is correct, our sense of balance tends to deteriorate with age

Does this mean if older folk cycled on a level football playing field with shut their eyes.They would likely crash?
Just curious as ability to balance seems to heavily depend on sensory eye input.

Well, it’s true that sighted people use visual clues to maintain balance, but I’m not aware that elderly blind folk fall over more than elderly sighted folk? Maybe blind folk compensate because they are constantly “practicing “ balancing without visual clues.

Supplementary question; do blind folk get seasick? Traditional explanation is that seasickness is caused by a mismatch between balance information from the organs of balance in your ears and visual clues. Blind folk lack the visual clues so can’t get seasick?

Anecdote alert; I came across a lad blind from birth who could ride a bike; that in itself is pretty special, but I saw him riding round a sports hall, he could hear where the walls were.

531colin wrote: ↑9 Jul 2024, 8:22pmSupplementary question; do blind folk get seasick? Traditional explanation is that seasickness is caused by a mismatch between balance information from the organs of balance in your ears and visual clues. Blind folk lack the visual clues so can’t get seasick?

You get travel sick when your ears tell you that you're moving, and your eyes don't confirm it. No vision = no confirmation of the movement.

I have had motion sickness twice in my life, on both occasions I was sat on a chair in a (stationary) office, looking down a 2 headed microscope.
The important thing is the other bloke was moving the thing we were looking at.