Brush Your Teeth to Improve Your Balance

How does brushing your teeth improve your balance?

In short, it doesn’t. 

BUT hear me out: add this one simple tweak to your oral hygiene routine, and you can better your balance without adding any time into your day. 

This is one of my favorite tips for my physical therapy patients, because it so easily fits into your daily routine, making it easy to remember, and it doesn’t actually take any extra time to do. This is so important, because the more seamlessly a habit can fit into your day, the more likely you are to do it consistently and see results. 

So let me set the scene: you’re at your bathroom sink, and you’re… brushing your teeth. You’re just standing there for at least a minute or two (or hopefully at least 30 seconds? Don’t tell me if it’s less than that please!) Then you spit, rinse, and move along with your day. 

Maybe you even repeat this process again before you go to sleep at night. 

This gives you at least one or two quick and easy opportunities each day to improve your balance, because instead of merely just standing there at your sink while you brush, you can, for example, also stand on one foot and balance. This way you’re brushing your teeth using one hand, your other hand is hovering over your sink in case you need it for support, and voila: you’re training your balance! 

Do you find standing on just one foot is too challenging? Try standing with one foot in front of the other, like you’re standing on a balance beam, with the heel of your front foot directly in front of the toes of your back foot: 

Or you can even try standing with your feet close together:

With each of these options, what you are doing is standing with a smaller or more narrow base of support. When you work to keep your balance while standing with a smaller base of support, you are training your proprioception, which is your ability to sense your body’s position. The sharper our joints and brain communicate with each other, the better your proprioception is, which results in a better ability to balance. 

You want to choose one of these options based on how they feel to you. This means you want to feel slightly wobbly, but not so challenging that you have to hold onto your counter the whole time. You don’t want to feel perfectly steady and stable, because if it feels that easy, it means you aren’t doing anything to improve your balance! If you have to occasionally touch your foot down, or hold your counter with the hand that’s not brushing your teeth, that’s ok! As you practice, you will find that you will be able to stand longer and longer without needing to support yourself with your hands. 

Don’t forget to switch feet if you’re standing on one leg, or switch whichever foot is in front, so that way you can train both sides.

A quick word about footwear safety: if you have hard floors, be sure you're either barefoot or are wearing shoes with a good tread for these exercises- in other words, you don't want to be wearing socks on hard floors because this poses the risk for you to slip and fall. 

You’ll be surprised at how quickly you can feel your balance improving with just a minute a day, a few days a week. For best results, try to incorporate this into your daily routine at least 4 days a week. You can do this every day, 7 days a week if you’d like: this helps it to become a habit more quickly, and it will make it less likely that you’ll forget or that you’ll miss a day.

Check out this quick video if you'd like to see this tip in video form by clicking HERE to watch it.

So go ahead, add a little spice to your dental hygiene routine and try it out! You’re just standing there anyway, you may as well get some balance benefits out of it.