Balance training isn't just about standing on one foot. And it certainly isn't just for older adults!
Think about all the times you rely on your balance throughout the day: navigating an uneven hiking trail, walking your dog, reaching for something on a high shelf, stepping over your grandson’s spilled Legos, playing pickleball, or recovering when you trip over a crack in the sidewalk.
Good balance requires a combination of strength, coordination, sensory awareness, and quick reactions. And like other physical skills, balance can improve with practice. But here's the catch: Not all balance exercises train the same skills.
Standing on one foot might help you get better at standing on one foot. But will it prepare you to recover from a stumble, navigate a crowded sidewalk, or maintain your stability while carrying groceries up the stairs? Not necessarily.
That's why we love balance training in the pool. Water provides a unique environment for challenging stability. Buoyancy supports some of your body weight, resistance slows your movements, and turbulence creates unexpected challenges that force your muscles to respond. By changing your body position, equipment, or movement patterns, you can make an exercise easier, harder, or simply different.
And unlike traditional balance exercises performed on land, aquatic exercises offer plenty of opportunities to experiment, move, and play.
Ready to challenge your balance? Let's dive in! (New to balance training? Check out Part I: Balance Basics to learn more about how balance works and ways to assess your stability.)
Before We Jump In: What Makes Balance Training Effective?
Here are a few important principles that should guide your balance workouts:
Train for real life. Balance is task-specific. If your goal is to improve stability while walking, reaching, turning, or stepping over obstacles, your training should include those movements.
Challenge multiple systems. Effective balance training involves more than maintaining a static position. Incorporate movement, sensory challenges, changes in direction, and tasks that require quick reactions.
Practice with purpose. Balance is a motor skill. Consistent, appropriately challenging practice helps improve your ability to respond to different situations.
Don't wait until you're exhausted. Challenging balance activities require concentration and coordination. Practice demanding skills when you're alert and able to maintain good movement quality.
The goal isn't to make every exercise as difficult as possible. It's to create an appropriate challenge that encourages your body to adapt.
Here are six ways to do exactly that.
Let’s get wet! Here are 6 ways to create your balance program:
Pick a Body Position
Who says balance training has to happen on your feet?
Changing your body position is one of the easiest ways to modify a balance exercise. In the pool, you can practice stability in several positions:
Sitting: Work on trunk control and maintaining an upright posture while the water moves around you.
Half kneeling: Challenge hip and core stability with one knee down and the opposite foot forward.
Tall kneeling: Remove the contribution of your ankles and feet to emphasize control through your hips and trunk.
Standing: Practice the postural strategies you use for walking, reaching, and everyday activities.
If your pool has an appropriately shallow area or beach entry, you might even incorporate transitions between positions, such as kneeling to standing.
Whatever position you choose, pay attention to your posture and alignment.
Our coaching tip: When standing, think about creating a tripod foot. Maintain contact through three points: your heel, the base of your big toe, and the base of your little toe. This creates a stable foundation while allowing your ankles and feet to make small adjustments.
Remember, your core doesn't stop at your waist. Your feet, ankles, hips, and trunk all contribute to maintaining stability.
2. Select your Base of Support
Want to make a balance exercise more challenging? Change your base of support.
Your base of support is the area beneath and between the points where your body contacts a supporting surface. Generally, a wider base provides more stability, while a narrower base requires greater postural control.
Try progressing through these positions:
Natural stance: Feet approximately hip- or shoulder-width apart.
Narrow stance: Bring your feet closer together.
Tandem stance: Position one foot directly in front of the other, as though standing on a balance beam.
Single-leg stance: Lift one foot off the pool floor.
Suspended position: In deep water, remove contact with the pool floor and challenge your ability to control your body without a fixed base of support.
That last option is one of the things we love about aquatic exercise!
When you're suspended in deep water, maintaining an upright position becomes a different kind of challenge. Your trunk, hips, and surrounding muscles must work together to control your position against buoyancy, resistance, and water movement.
It's not exactly the same as balancing on land, but it's an excellent opportunity to develop body awareness and trunk control.
Our coaching tip: Don't rush to the most difficult position. A narrower stance isn't automatically better. Choose a position that challenges you without sacrificing posture or movement quality.
3. Mix up your Surface Type
Think about the surfaces you encounter every day: hardwood floors, carpet, grass, sand, gravel, and uneven sidewalks. Your body must continually adjust to changes in the surface beneath you. We can introduce some of that variability in the pool, too!
Changing the supporting surface modifies the sensory information your body receives and can increase the demands on your postural control.
IN SITTING:
Start with your feet supported on the pool floor. Then experiment with sitting on different pieces of aquatic equipment, such as:
A pool noodle
A buoyancy barbell
A Wonderboard
A pool skateboard or other appropriately designed floating platform
Depending on the equipment, you can practice maintaining your position, shifting your weight, reaching, or moving your arms and legs. As the equipment moves beneath you, your trunk and hips must make continuous adjustments to keep you stable.
IN STANDING:
Begin barefoot on the pool floor. Once you've mastered an exercise, consider introducing an unstable surface, such as a foam balance device or pool noodle, with appropriate supervision and support. For example, standing on a noodle can create gentle forward-and-backward movement at the ankles. Changing your foot position may introduce side-to-side challenges.
These activities can help you practice postural corrections, including the ankle strategy used to manage smaller changes in balance.
You can also experiment with standing on a noodle while suspended in deep water.
But here's an important distinction: Standing on an unstable surface in shallow water and standing on one in deep water are not the same exercise. In shallow water, your feet interact with a supporting surface, and you practice controlling your body over that base. In deep water, you're primarily challenging trunk stability, body orientation, and control against buoyancy. Both are valuable. They simply train different skills.
Our coaching tip: Variety is great, but unstable equipment isn't necessary for an effective balance workout. Master the basics before adding complexity, and reserve challenging floating surfaces for appropriately supervised sessions.
4. Alter your Visual Cues
Your eyes do a lot more than help you admire the scenery! Vision provides important information about your body's position, your surroundings, and potential obstacles. But vision is only one part of the balance equation. Your body also relies on the vestibular system in your inner ears and the somatosensory system, which provides information from your muscles, joints, and skin. Your brain combines these inputs to help you maintain stability. When one source of information becomes less reliable, your body must place greater emphasis on the others.
That's why changing visual input can make even a familiar balance exercise surprisingly challenging.
Try these progressions:
Eyes open: Focus on a stationary point in front of you.
Head turns: Slowly turn your head from side to side while maintaining your position.
Head nods: Look up and down without losing your alignment.
Altered gaze: Maintain your head or gaze in a different direction while performing the exercise.
Eyes closed: Remove visual information and rely more heavily on other sensory systems.
You might be surprised how much harder a simple standing exercise becomes when you turn your head!
Our coaching tip: Start with small, slow movements. If you have difficulty balancing in low-light conditions or when turning your head, this may be an area worth addressing with individualized training.
Eyes-closed exercises and more demanding sensory challenges should only be attempted with appropriate support and supervision. If head movements provoke dizziness or vertigo, stop and seek professional guidance.
5. Put It All Together: Dual Tasking
Here's where balance training gets really interesting. In everyday life, we rarely perform balance activities in isolation. We walk while talking. Carry groceries while navigating stairs. Turn our heads to look for traffic. Step around obstacles while thinking about something else entirely. In other words, we're constantly multitasking.
Dual-task training involves performing a balance or movement activity while completing a second physical or cognitive task.
The challenge isn't simply to do two things at once. It's to maintain movement quality, stability, and awareness while dividing your attention… and the pool offers endless possibilities!
SOME OF OUR FAVORITES:
Squat and carry: Perform squats or step-ups while holding a weighted ball.
Reach for the sky: Add an overhead reach during calf raises to simulate retrieving something from a high shelf.
Obstacle course: Step over, around, and between objects of different heights while carrying a pool toy on a kickboard. Bonus challenge: don't let the toy fall!
Strength plus stability: Perform upper-body resistance exercises while standing in a narrow or staggered stance.
Beach ball challenge: Stand on one foot while passing or tapping a beach ball between your hands.
Ring pick-up challenge: Maintain a single-leg stance while using the opposite foot to retrieve dive rings from the pool floor. Add a word puzzle or counting challenge for an extra cognitive component.
Play a game! Water volleyball, basketball, and other pool games encourage reaching, reacting, changing direction, and coordinating movements.
And that's just the beginning. You can modify almost any balance exercise by adding a secondary task, changing the environment, or introducing an unexpected movement.
Our coaching tip: Start with one task and establish good movement quality before adding another. If your posture, coordination, or stability deteriorates significantly, simplify the challenge. The goal is to develop better balance under realistic conditions—not to see how many things you can juggle before falling over!
6. Practice Falling (and Recovering!)
Let's talk about something most people would rather avoid: falling.
Imagine you're walking down a crowded beach path carrying a towel, beach chair, and tote bag. Suddenly, an enthusiastic dog darts across your path. Do you lose your balance? Can you take a quick step and recover? How fast does your body respond? These reactions are an important part of balance.
Your body uses several strategies to maintain or regain stability:
Ankle strategy: Small adjustments around the ankles help manage relatively minor disturbances.
Hip strategy: Larger or faster movements may require more significant adjustments through the hips and trunk.
Stepping strategy: When your center of mass moves beyond your base of support, taking a quick step can help you regain stability.
We can practice elements of these strategies through perturbation training—exercises that introduce an unexpected or controlled disturbance to your balance… and the pool provides a unique environment for doing so. Water's buoyancy and resistance can help slow movement and reduce some of the consequences of losing balance, creating opportunities to practice reactions that may feel intimidating on land.
TRY THESE SUPERVISED CHALLENGES:
Create turbulence. Have an instructor move a kickboard through the water nearby, creating waves that challenge your ability to remain upright.
Respond to gentle disturbances. With an appropriately trained professional, practice maintaining stability when small, controlled forces are applied in different directions.
Practice recovery steps. Begin with controlled weight shifts and progress to quick steps forward, backward, or sideways to regain your balance.
Change directions. Practice stopping, turning, and stepping in response to verbal or visual cues.
The key is to practice responding—not simply resisting movement.
SAFETY MATTERS: Perturbation training is not risk-free, even in water. Practice with qualified supervision, adequate space, appropriate water depth, and support when needed. Avoid collisions with pool walls, equipment, and other swimmers. Don't intentionally fall into the water or attempt uncontrolled loss-of-balance exercises.
The Bottom Line: Better Balance Takes More Than Standing Still
We LOVE working on balance in the pool.
Over the years, we've designed aquatic balance programs for people with a wide variety of needs and goals—from individuals recovering from ankle injuries or joint replacements to those managing neurological conditions, and even young children learning to walk.
But balance training isn't just about rehabilitation or fall prevention. It's about moving with greater confidence, improving coordination, responding to unexpected challenges, and staying capable of doing the activities you love. Whether you're a runner, hiker, pickleball player, weekend adventurer, or simply someone who wants to move better, balance deserves a place in your fitness routine.
And while aquatic balance training isn't a substitute for every land-based challenge, it's an excellent complement to other forms of exercise.
The best balance program is one that challenges you appropriately, addresses your individual needs, and prepares you for the activities that matter most.
Ready to Find Your Sea Legs?
At Anderson Aquatics in Santa Barbara, balance training is anything but boring. Our new Sea Legs class takes an intermediate-level approach to balance, agility, coordination, strengthening, and functional movement. We combine creative equipment, unexpected challenges, and plenty of variety to keep your body—and your brain—working. You never quite know what to expect. And that's part of the fun! Aqua Yoga is another class that is guaranteed to challenge your static and dynamic stability.
Looking for something more individualized? We also offer personal and small group training to help you work toward specific strength, balance, and movement goals.
And if you're already comfortable with aquatic exercise, our open pool sessions provide opportunities to practice independently.
If you’re ready to challenge your balance in a whole new way, explore our classes, find a session that fits your goals, and come discover what your body can do in the water.
Have a favorite pool balance exercise? Or a question about making balance training more challenging? We'd love to hear from you! Note: this post was originally published in January 2024 & updated in October 2026.
Content provided on this website is for informational and educational purposes only; it does not constitute providing medical advice or professional services. Always seek the advice of your physician regarding your health conditions and prior to initiating an exercise program.
