Golfers have better balance

Golfers have better balance

As I said last time, I love golf. I like to play it; I like to read about it; and I like to write about it. A very good friend of mine, Dr. Allan Adkin (http://www.brocku.ca/applied-health-sciences/faculty-directory/kinesiology/allan-adkin), whose research focuses on how fear of falling and balance confidence affect older people’s balance, sent me an article about how golfing might improve a person’s balance confidence, and indeed their balance. Does this mean that playing golf might reduce your risk of falling?

The authors of the study, entitled “Golfers have better balance control and confidence than healthy controls” (click here for more information - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21416145), reported that the golfers had better balance, and they had greater confidence in their own balance ability. Eleven older golfers, with an average age of 66 years (not really very old, right?), and 12 same-aged people who have never golfed participated in this study. Everyone completed two tests: a functional reach test, and a test called the ‘sensory organization test’. The functional reach test involves each person standing up straight and reaching forward and then to the side; the position of their fingertips is marked on a tape measure. And then they reach along the tape measure as far as they can without losing their balance. The further they can reach, the better their balance. As a group, the golfers were able to reach further than the non-golfers.

The second test, the sensory organization test, involves standing as still as possible under a number of different conditions: with eyes open, eyes closed, and under conditions in which the floor rotates with the person’s sway (so that there is no sensory feedback from the ankles) and in which the walls around them rotate with the person’s sway (so that it doesn’t look like the wall gets closer when you sway forward, or farther away when you sway backward). This test has been used for years to detect how different sensory systems are affected in terms of balance as a person ages or is affected by disease (such as Parkinson’s Disease) (click here for more information - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10191839). This test showed that golfers performed better on the conditions that tested vision and the vestibular system – the inner ear system for balance control.

Finally, everyone complete a questionnaire called the “Activities-specific Balance Confidence scale”. This questionnaire asks people how confident they are (scored between 0 and 100, with 100 being most confident) when they complete different tasks, such as walking, going down stairs, and standing on a chair to reach something up high. The golfers scored better than the non-golfers, showing that the golfers have more confidence in their ability to keep their balance under different circumstances. But really, golfers didn’t score much better than the non-golfers – the difference was only about 7%. It’s worth noting that both groups of people in the study were healthy, and no one in either group had a history of falling in the past year (none of them were ‘fallers’) – it’s expected that even the non-golfers would have good balance confidence. What’s interesting is that the golfers had even better balance confidence.

It appears that golfers have better balance and, importantly, greater confidence in their own balance ability than (healthy and same-aged) non-golfers. It’s important to remember that research very rarely gives us any insight into causal relationships. That is, most research doesn’t tell us that A causes B. Instead, it generally tells us that A is related to B. In this case of balance and golfing, it’s important to note that the best we can really say is that golfing is associated with (or related to) having better balance and greater balance confidence. Strictly speaking, we can’t say that golfing caused, or created better balance among the golfers. This is because it would be equally valid (or equally invalid) to say that having better balance caused people to take up golf. But that would seem a bit absurd. Having good balance is unlikely to cause someone to take up golf. It’s probably pretty safe to say that regular golfing, which causes people to swing the club and shift their weight, which challenges their balance control, causes people to stand in awkward postures (like on the side of a hill or in a sand trap) and regularly walk across uneven ground, will eventually lead to improved balance and greater confidence in one’s own balance abilities.

Golfers have better balance and greater confidence in their balance. Perhaps golfing leads to improvements in balance and balance confidence. If you are not a golfer today should you take up golfing in order to improve your balance? Perhaps not. But if you are a golfer, I would encourage you to keep golfing. It’s good for your balance. It’s also good for your heart – as Mark Twain said, “Golf is a long walk spoiled.” I don’t think that Twain was a golfer. But the long walk is always going to be good for your heart and muscles. So keep at it.