Part 1 – The Basics

Riding a Vew-Do Balance Board is fun and its challenging. For some, that is all the reason in the world to jump on a board and ride everyday. For others, the benefits of riding a Vew-Do Balance Board are the longer term benefits of balance training. Balance, like strength, flexibility and endurance, is something that can be improved with training and balance training has benefits that go way beyond just keeping you on your feet.

The benefits of riding a Vew-Do Balance Board start with strength and coordination:

• Muscle Strength – The basic premise of riding a Vew-Do board is that you destabilize your body which forces muscles throughout the body to work to stabilize the body. This engages your core and lower body, including your legs and joints.
• Core Strength – When you ride a Vew-Do board you force your body to try and stabilize itself. This starts by activating the muscles in your core. The more you ride, the more you strengthen the core. This is especially true on a Vew-Do board as the rotational movement works the lat (back) and glute (butt) muscles in addition to your abs (stomach) and other muscle groups.
• Joint Strength – As you ride, your ankles, knees and hips are actively involved as your body works to keep itself stable. This works many of the smaller muscles around the joints, muscles that often are underwork in a regular gym workout on machines.
• Leg Strength – As soon as you step on a Vew-Do board, your leg muscles jump into action. Spend ten minutes on a board and feel the burn, without ever lifting any weights.

Neuromuscular coordination – Your brain is working constantly to figure out where the rest of the body is, known as proprioception. Riding a Vew-Do board adds additional challenge to the system and pushes this communication into overdrive. With regular training you’ll improve your neuromuscular coordination and overall body awareness.

When you improve both strength and coordination you add several other benefits.

• Faster Reaction Time: You’ll react faster as you improve your balance skills.
• More Agility: You’ll be quicker and nimbler.
• More Power: With more strength and faster reaction times, you’ll be able to exert maximum effort instantly.

Reduced Risk of Injury – When you combine all of this together, you will reduce your overall risk of injury. When you have better coordination, you will correct yourself faster if thrown off balance. Because you’ve strengthened all the key muscles needed to stabilize the body, especially around your joints, this will help you prevent a fall and further injury. There have been studies that show that by adding balance training to a workout it lowers the injury rate, especially ankle injuries.

Flexibility – You can easily add stretching movements into your balance training on a Vew-Do board that will increase your flexibility, another important factor for lowering the risk of injury. Do some yoga on a Vew-Do board to take it to a whole new level

Calorie Burn – As your body works to stabilize itself on a balance board it’s burning calories. 

Results Amplification – Just riding a Vew-Do balance board every day will help anyone improve in all of these areas. For many, that will be enough, but for those looking to amplify these benefits, you simply add the balance component to many of your other fitness routines. This might be pushups with your hands on the ends of a Vew-Do board, it might be squats (with or without additional weights) while standing on a balance board, it might be using dumbbells while balancing on a Vew-Do board, etc. When you do this you will immediately feel the difference the destabilization nature of the balance board has on the overall effort needed and the results will be impressive.

Confidence – Riding a Vew-Do balance board is challenging, especially in the beginning. You can easily keep the challenge level high by increasing the difficulty of the moves you attempt on the board, especially by adding rotational movement. Anyone that puts the time and effort into riding their balance board will improve and most will be amazed at the level and speed of improvement once they get into it. With improvement comes confidence and this confidence will easily transfer into other activities and sports. The more you ride the more confident you’ll get.

Fun – Fun. How often do you hear that word associated with getting in shape? Not that often, but riding a Vew-Do balance board is something that is great for you and really fun to do. We get feedback all the time from people telling us how much they love their board or how much their kids use it, even while watching TV or playing video games.

Add it all up. Riding a Vew-Do balance board is something almost everyone can benefit from, from little toddlers to anyone that gets the “senior discount”. We’ll talk more about that in the next Benefits of Balance post in a couple weeks.

 

Part 2 - Rotation

Rotation is the 3rd dimension of balance training and the difference between our Vew-Do Balance Boards and all the others.  All balance boards let you rock back and forth, but every Vew-Do board is designed to allow you to rotate and even spin your board, adding an entirely new level of performance and fun while amplifying the basic benefits of balance training.