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Summary
On episode 357 of 40+ Fitness, Coach Allan sits down with Carol Clements, a personal trainer with more than 40 years of experience who now works with older populations and is the author of Better Balance for Life.
Carol argues that falling isn’t just bad luck: it’s the predictable result of lower body weakness, poor coordination, and a growing fear of falling that makes people move more cautiously and, ironically, less safely. Her book builds balance practice into ordinary daily activities instead of gym equipment.
The conversation walks through her 5 principles of body balance, a simple at-home balance self-test, and how a 10-week plan of small daily habits (brushing your teeth, texting, stepping sideways down a hallway) rebuilds confidence along with balance.
Links
- https://40plusfitness.com
Key Takeaways
- Falls after 65 are far more common and dangerous than most people realize. Roughly 1 in 3 adults over 65 falls each year, and in the United States that leads to about 300,000 hospitalizations and 29,000 deaths annually. Carol treats balance training as prevention, not a reaction to an injury that’s already happened.
- Fear of falling is itself a major predictor of falling. People who are afraid tighten up, shorten their gait, and move less naturally, which makes them less stable, not more. Carol designed her program to rebuild confidence alongside physical balance so people stay active instead of restricting their lives out of fear.
- Balance training follows 5 principles that connect the whole body, from head to feet. They are aligning the head over the spine, opening the chest so the shoulder blades do the work instead of the neck, engaging the front core rather than overusing the lower back, lengthening the front of the hip instead of hinging forward at it, and reactivating the feet to push off actively instead of going passive inside shoes.
- You can build balance practice into things you’re already doing every day. Carol’s 10-week plan ties specific balance activities to daily habits like brushing your teeth, waiting at the kitchen counter, or getting dressed, with about 4 activities introduced per week that get progressively harder.
- A simple self-test shows you where your balance actually stands. Stand behind a sturdy chair with feet together, place your hands on the chair back, then let go and cross your arms while closing one eye at a time. How much you waver, and how tense or panicked you feel doing it, tells you honestly where you need to work.
- Stepping sideways is a skill most people never practice. Everyday movement is almost entirely forward, so when a real stumble happens, most people have no experience recovering sideways or backward. Carol has clients deliberately practice lateral steps, such as in a hallway at home, to build that missing range of motion into muscle memory.
- Practicing controlled instability is how the body learns to recover automatically. Just like learning to drive a stick shift eventually becomes automatic, repeatedly wavering slightly off balance, in a safe position near something to grab, trains the nervous system to respond without conscious thought when a real loss of balance happens.
- Carol Clements’s three strategies to get and stay well: stop treating health as a theory and actually restructure your daily circumstances around it; choose the healthier option inside your existing routines, like picking better places to eat out; and find an engaging active pursuit, such as Tai Chi or ping pong, and build your social life around it.
“Your likelihood of falling over the age of 65 is just astronomically high.”
Carol Clements
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