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2026-01-16 Science & Technology
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The surprising benefits of standing on one leg
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[BBC] Balancing on a single limb can be surprisingly challenging as we get older, but training yourself to do it for longer can make you stronger, boost your memory and keep your brain healthier.
Unless you're a flamingo, spending time delicately poised on one leg isn't something you probably invest a lot of time in. And depending on your age, you might find it surprisingly difficult.
Balancing on one leg generally doesn't take a lot of thought when we are young. Typically our ability to hold this pose matures by around the ages of nine to 10 years old. Our balance then peaks in our late 30s before declining.
If you're over the age of 50, your ability to balance on a single leg for more than a few seconds can indicate a surprising amount about your general health and how well you're ageing.
But there are also some good reasons why you might want to spend more time wobbling about on one pin – it can bring a range of benefits to your body and brain, such as helping to reduce the risk of falls, building your strength and improving your memory. This deceptively simple exercise can have an outsized effect on your health as you age.
"If you find that it's not easy, it's time to start training your balance," says Tracy Espiritu McKay, a rehabilitation medicine specialist for the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. (More on how to build a one-legged training regime into your day later in this article.)
WHY CARE ABOUT YOUR BALANCE?
One of the main reasons doctors use standing on one leg as a measure of health is its link with the progressive age-related loss of muscle tissue, or sarcopenia.
From the age of 30 onwards, we lose muscle mass at a rate of up to 8% per decade. By the time we reach our 80s, some research has suggested that up to 50% of people have clinical sarcopenia.
This has been linked to everything from diminished blood sugar control to waning immunity against diseases, but because it affects the strength of various muscle groups, it is also reflected through your ability to balance on one leg. At the same time, people who practice one-legged training are less likely to be as vulnerable to sarcopenia in their latter decades, as this simple exercise helps keep the leg and hip muscles honed.
"The ability to stand on one leg diminishes [with age]," says Kenton Kaufman, director of the motion analysis laboratory at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. "People are over 50 or 60 when they start to experience it and then it increases quite a bit with each decade of life after that."
There is also another, more subtle reason that makes our ability to balance on one leg important – how it links to our brain.
This deceptively simple pose requires not only muscle strength and flexibility, but your brain's ability to integrate information from your eyes, the balance centre in the inner ear known as the vestibular system and the somatosensory system, a complex network of nerves that help us sense both body position and the ground beneath us.
"All of these systems degrade with age at different rates," says Kaufman.
This means that your ability to stand on one leg can reveal a lot about the underlying state of key brain regions, says Espiritu McKay. This includes those involved in your reaction speeds, your ability to carry out everyday tasks and how quickly you can integrate information from your sensory systems.
Spookily, your ability to stand on one leg even reflects your short-term risk of premature death. Take the findings of a 2022 study, which found that people unable to hold a single-legged pose for 10 seconds in mid-later life were 84% more likely to die from any cause over the following seven years. Another study took 2,760 men and women in their 50s and put them through three tests – grip strength, how many times they could go from sitting to standing in a minute and how long they could stand on one leg with their eyes closed. (Read more about what the grip strength test and sit to stand test can reveal about how you are ageing.)
The single-leg stance test proved to be the most informative for their disease risk. Over the next 13 years, those able to stand on one leg for two seconds or less were three times more likely to have died than those who could do so for 10 seconds or more.
According to Espiritu McKay, this same pattern can even be seen in people who have been diagnosed with dementia – those who can still balance on one leg are experiencing a slower decline. "In Alzheimer's patients, researchers are actually finding that if they're unable to stand on one leg for five seconds, it usually predicts a faster cognitive decline," she says.
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