Preparing Your Body to Handle a Fall
Think about falling. What did you picture: A slippery surface, catching your foot on uneven pavement, or maybe something knocking you over? The origin and factors of each fall can vary, but so too can fall outcomes. When you picture falling, do you get back up?
The reality is that anyone can fall and statistically we all should expect to fall at some point. Falls can result in life changing injuries or merely a slight embarrassment as you get up while hoping no one saw it happen. Good news, you have more control over the outcome than you might think.
Physical preparedness can make all the difference between a serious injury and just an embarrassing bruise or scrape. While we can't eliminate every unexpected event, we can improve the body's ability to respond, absorb force, and recover.
Preparation for a fall should focus around training balance, strength, power, response speed, and mobility. Each aspect of physical fitness plays an important role in reducing injury risk and maintaining your ability to get back up after a fall.
Balance: Control and loss in stability
Falls start with the loss of balance. This can happen while standing still in a precarious position, or more typically, while in motion walking. Slips and trips are by far the most common and involve loss of balance during a dynamic (moving) state.
Balance training often focuses on stationary tasks such as someone standing perfectly still on one foot. This is not a bad exercise, but it fails to provide specific practice for the scenario. Falls tend to happen after loss of dynamic balance, so static training lacks specificity for the activities where we want to maintain balance.
Maintaining balance is a remarkably complex process that depends on three primary sensory systems working together every second you're awake. In no specific order these senses are your vision, equilibrium, and proprioception.
Your Visual System
Your eyes constantly scan your surroundings, helping your brain understand where you are relative to the environment. Changes in lighting, uneven walking surfaces, obstacles, and moving objects all influence how your body responds.
Your Vestibular System
Located within the inner ear, the vestibular system acts as your body's motion sensor. It detects changes in head position and movement, helping maintain equilibrium and body orientation in space as you move.
Your Proprioceptive System
Proprioception is your body's awareness of each individual component in space. Close your eyes and lift your arm. How do you know which direction or how high your arm moved? Proprioceptors keep track of your arm and all other components through specialized receptors in your muscles, tendons, and joints that continuously offer feedback to your brain.
Combined Sensory Control
Imagine stepping onto an uneven sidewalk. Your eyes recognize the change in terrain, your inner ear senses the shift in your body's movement, and receptors in your ankle immediately detect the change in joint position. Within fractions of a second, your brain processes this information and directs your muscles to react.
We can control ourselves in almost all environments when these systems work efficiently together. Conversely, we tend to experience higher fall risk when these sensations are left untrained or distracted. Successful preparation for a fall should include exercises that challenge or include active use of each sensory system. In some cases integrating multiple senses.
There are many more exercises that can help focus your attention on your body’s sensory information. These types of exercises also provide useful tools for incorporating sensory input during training that focuses on other aspects of fall preparedness.
Strength: Muscle and Body Resilience
Strength is the measure of total force production from our muscular system. That aside, we can infer much more about a body given its strength. Muscle and bone strength are highly correlated. As muscle strength increases, so does bone density.
Falling is essentially a physics problem. Body mass is accelerated downward by gravity and will disperse the landing force through all structures that hit the ground during impact. Dense bones can absorb more force and energy from the fall, and larger muscles can spread the force out over a greater area to reduce the physical stress as we hit the ground. If you are still awake after thinking about physics, then let’s look at what we can do to train strength!
Focus on two primary variables of strength training. Intensity, or difficulty level, of an exercise and the recovery time between training. High intensity, short duration training tends to best stimulate increased bone and muscle strength. The results; however, are specific to the muscles and bones worked in the exercise. We must therefore regularly incorporate heavy strength training for the most commonly injured areas like the lower body and spine, but we should also consider benefits to upper body strengthening as a tool to spread out force throughout the body as we fall. Including exercises that strengthen the lower leg and foot could be a game changer for your structure and function.
Aside from exercise intensity, rest and recovery play an invaluable role in how much our system repairs to improve after exercise. Consider methods of rest that you can add to the typical recommendation of 8 hours sleep at night. For example, how are you allowing your body to recover mentally after stressful days, or emotionally after major life events. Each stressor adds metaphorical weight for your body to carry. Lowering that added stress can yield big advances to strength through improved recovery.
Power: Strength at Speed
While strength is important, falls happen quickly. Muscular speed matters when your body takes seconds to respond during a split second event such as falling.
Muscular power is your ability to produce force rapidly, and it's one of the first physical qualities to decline with inactivity and aging. From a biomechanical perspective, your ability to quickly generate force often determines whether you regain your balance or continue falling. Power can be progressed from lower level efforts to high explosive effort outputs. Try something like a split stance lunge up to standing, while focusing on the effort of pushing up from the ground to stand. This can be progressed into a jumping split stance lunge.
Power exercises that require fast movements are more specific to the type of contractions needed during a fall. Especially exercises that require you to slow the descent of the body towards the floor.
Response Time: Speed in Emergencies
Every successful recovery from a stumble begins with rapid communication between your brain and your muscles. Response time is the interval between recognizing a loss of balance and producing the movement needed to recover.
Activities that require quick changes in direction (agility), hand-eye coordination, or rapid decision-making improve this communication. These types of exercises should include fast, and if possible unexpected changes to your movements. Setting an external alert on your phone to change directions or including a dual-task for your brain while you move can help to increase your response speed. Although, complexity is not required. Simple activities coordinating abrupt change in motion can improve your ability to change movements at speed.
Additionally recreational activities that include agility such as racquet sports, dancing, and even simple walking or running drills all help train your nervous system to recognize and respond more efficiently.
Mobility Gives You More Options
Imagine tripping while walking. You might be powerful and quick to respond, but you won’t catch yourself if your hips can’t achieve the required range of motion.
Primarily the mobility for lower body joints like the ankles, knees, and hips will influence our capacity to reduce falling speed. However, we should not discount our ability to reach our arms out to absorb force during fall impact.
Mobility includes the available range of motion at a joint as well as the strength and stability of our muscular system to support those positions. Training specific positions that are not typically taken through full range during typical daily activities can enable better force absorption at each joint affected during a fall.
Mobility offers opportunities for movement. To some extent, the greater the range of movement that your body can control, the more options it has to avoid injury.
Can You Learn to Fall Better?
Yes! Train each individual component mentioned here or combine them in regular exercise and you will improve your outcomes from a fall. Reducing intensity of landing force, or spreading that force around multiple body parts can greatly reduce severity of fall injury risk.
How you fall matters.
You could "catch yourself" with stiff, locked arms, which can increase the risk of wrist, elbow, and shoulder injuries. Alternatively, you could train to take quick and long steps, allow larger muscles to absorb force, and protect the head as you roll to the ground.
For most people, safely practicing getting down to and up from the floor, learning controlled rolling movements under professional supervision, and maintaining the strength to rise independently after a fall are practical skills that build confidence and resilience.
No exercise program can guarantee that you'll never fall. Accidents happen. Falls are unpredictable. Your physical preparation, on the other hand, is not. Every squat, every balance drill, every mobility exercise, and every brisk walk is an investment in your body's ability to respond when the unexpected happens.
We all should expect to fall at some point. Build a body that is strong, adaptable, and resilient enough to handle them.
Written and edited by Aaron Wesbrook and the Precision Human Performance Team