Why balance practice may work better at first when it is the only thing you are doing

As a Feldenkrais® practitioner who works mostly with people over sixty, I hear one balance tip more often than any other. Stand on one leg while you brush your teeth. It's a kind idea, because it hides practice inside a habit you already have, and a study published this week raises a quiet question about when in the learning that hiding works best.

What the study did

The work comes from the physiotherapy department at Balıkesir University in Türkiye, where Ömer Burak Tor, Utku Berberoğlu and Serdar Demirci asked whether learning to balance needs the thinking parts of the brain, or whether it happens somewhere more automatic (European Journal of Neuroscience, 2026). Their way of testing it was simple. Give the brain something else to do, and see whether the learning slows.

Twenty five healthy young adults, average age about 21, stood on a wobbling balance board for one short session: five sets of three trials, each 40 seconds long. Thirteen of them simply stood. The other twelve counted backward in threes from a random number the whole time, the kind of task that keeps you busy without asking you to move. A small sensor on the board recorded how far it tilted and how quickly it rocked, side to side and front to back.

What changed, and what didn't

Both groups got steadier. Within one session the wobble narrowed in every direction, and side to side the two groups improved in much the same way. Counting did not stop anyone from learning.

The difference showed up front to back. Only the people who weren't counting learned to slow the board's forward and back rocking (slower rocking usually means smaller, smoother corrections), and in the third set their rocking was measurably slower than the counters'. The authors read this as a sign that early balance learning draws on attention, and that a mental task competes for the same resources.

Keep it in proportion. This was 25 students, one session, one measure out of several, and nobody was tested a day later to see what stayed. It says nothing directly about people in their sixties or seventies, and nobody brushed their teeth.

It also sits next to a larger body of work pointing the other way, and both can be true. A 2024 review pooled 14 studies with 691 healthy older adults and found that dual task training (balance practice combined on purpose with a thinking task) improved balance compared with no training, and a little more than other kinds of training (Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics, 2024). Real life asks you to balance while you talk, carry things and think about dinner, so practising that has value. The new study adds a question about order.

The Feldenkrais angle

In the Feldenkrais Method® we treat balance as something the nervous system learns, not a strength you either have or lack. Awareness Through Movement® lessons are slow and quiet for a reason: a difference has to be felt before it can be chosen, and feeling takes attention. Once your system has found an easier way to stand, it no longer needs you watching, and that's the moment when it can share you with a toothbrush or a conversation.

So the question isn't whether to combine. It's when. First the standing, alone. Then the rest of life.

If a physiotherapist has given you a balance programme, this sits alongside it, not in place of it, and the order you do things in is a good thing to ask them about. People who feel unsteady or wary of falling often try to practise balance in the least noticeable way, in the middle of something else, partly so it doesn't feel like a big deal. I understand that completely. What I see again and again in classes, though, is that the first change comes when someone stops doing three things and simply stands; it shows up in the feet, in how much detail they can feel there, which is also what tends to fade as our sense of position changes with age.

The toothbrush tip still has its place. It may simply work better as the second chapter than the first.

Somewhere around the third set, the students who were only standing found something in the front and back of their feet. The others were busy with the next number, eighty one, seventy eight, seventy five, and the board kept rocking.