What is Balance?
Balance is an important part of any athleticism and martial arts. In everyday activities, the well-maintained balance has a major part in life. Achieving a good balance at an early age will give a child a healthy posture later in life. It will also help them avoid problems such as muscle weakness and breathing difficulties when they get older. There are many techniques available to maintain balance. While practising martial arts, your children will be able to improve not only the physical ability but also mental capacity which in turn directly affects their balance.
Why it’s important in children?
Children spend a lot of time hunching, whether they’re in front of the computer screen or playing video games. This means they need to spend time working on their balance and posture – and guess what can help with that? Standing or exercising on one leg is a classic martial arts balance training technique which will help children correcting their posture and balance.
How can your kids be agile through martial art?
The ability to control your body’s position, especially while moving and performing physical activities has many proven benefits. To control the body’s centre of gravity while experiencing the stresses in martial art without incurring any injury is referred to as agility. Agility is the ability to move gracefully or proficiently which can be attained in children through our karate training. The body prefers the ability to move its joints smoothly through a full range of motion without friction. As elements like speed and sports stress increase, the joints can experience more stress and the ability to control the centre of gravity and range of motion become affected. Through balance, the body can experience similar sport stresses in a dynamic re-enactment of sport play. By doing this, balance and agility are improved. On a microscopic level, martial arts can prevent injuries and ultimately improve the integrity of the joint, tendons and ligaments. In other words, balance training increases kinetics coordination and proprioception in children.
- Strengthening body and base:
Our training of martial arts will help your children to equip with techniques that combine kicking, blocking, and striking by actively shifting their weight between the lower extremities while the upper extremities are moving. This type of movement necessitates stabilising the body for efficient movement of the extremities to maintain balance during these dynamic activities. These activities also include moving between long, wide stances that require older adults to spend more time in single-limb support as they lengthen their stride to achieve the desired stance.
- Muscle engagements in Martial Arts:
Improvements in balance and walking ability can be explained by the nature of movements practised during Karate. First, martial art uses long, wide stances in conjunction with upper extremity motion. These stances encourage longer step lengths. Second, moving between stances using combinations of kicks, blocks, and strikes causes children to spend more time in single-limb support while coordinating their arm movements. These types of movements can lengthen the swing phase of walking. Third, martial art forms further challenge dynamic balance by incorporating directional changes of 90°, 180°, and 270° in conjunction with blocks, strikes, and kicks. Practising these turns emphasises orientation with respect to space, thus improving balance while the body is moving. As a consequence, many of the movements practised in martial arts amplify the dynamic components of balance in developing children.
- Improves mental balance:
Martial art is as much a mental activity as it is a physical one enabling your child sharp and mentally balanced. Meditation, self-reflection and other techniques in martial arts go hand in hand making your children with improved sharpness, alertness and focus. This is will help them in situations where they are under duress and better able to maintain balance because of mental sharpness.
Furthermore, mental sharpness can also compensate for a compromise or a lack of balance. If your kid would find himself inevitably off balance, mental sharpness can sometimes save the day.
