Here’s Why Being Able to Stand Like a Flamingo Matters, and How to Practice Like a Pro

If you were to follow me around for a day at work in the outpatient physical therapy clinic, you’d see me working on SLS- or “single limb stance”- with a lot of my patients, whether they are post-op, an athlete rehabbing so they can return to sport, or someone just wanting to improve their balance. 

Single limb stance is exactly what it sounds like: standing on just one leg. I like to call it “flamingo stance.” Seems simple, but this one exercise can take on a wide variety of forms, depending on who is practicing it. SLS may look like this: simply standing in front of an exercise barre while holding on for support. As you build the skill, it may look like standing on an unsteady surface such as a balance pad or a couch cushion. It may involve you moving your arms or trunk side to side, or back and forth, as you stay balanced on that one leg. When you get really advanced, you may be standing on one leg on an exercise half-ball such as a BOSU, throwing and catching a medicine ball off a rebounder. If you’re having a hard time picturing this, watch this video of an NFL player training his SLS by clicking HERE. To sum it up, this exercise can be tailored to meet you exactly where you are, whether you’re just starting out or if you’re more advanced and looking for a higher-level exercise. 

Now for the million dollar question that I get asked almost daily by my PT patients: “WHY do I need to be able to stand on just one leg?” 

It’s a great question, because yes, it is true that during your day-to-day routine, you don’t have to stand on just one leg for extended periods to get through the day. However, and this is what most people don’t realize, we do need to be able to stabilize on one leg when we walk. In fact, 60% of our gait cycle is spent in single-limb-support, which means that over half the time we are walking, we are balancing on just one leg. Take a look at this picture that illustrates each phase of gait over the course of one stride length:  

picture from www.physio-pedia.com

If you need a larger version of this picture, click HERE.

What I want you to notice in the picture above is the white bars directly underneath the person walking that denote “double support”- meaning both feet are in contact with the ground, and “single support”- meaning just one leg is in contact with the ground (ie, you are balancing on just one leg during this time). You can see how much more time is spent in “single support” over the course of one stride length, compared to "double support." This helps to show that single leg balance is extremely functional, because we do it each and every day, every time we walk. 

Furthermore, the ability to stand on one leg has been well researched, and the data tells us that people that can do it well are less likely to fall. The data also tells us that those that cannot do it well are at much higher fall risk, that those individuals have more falls, and that they sustain more serious injuries from falls as well. 

In healthy older adults, the inability to stand on one leg for at least 5 seconds is a predictor of injurious falls. (Click HERE for the source of this stat) The ability to stand on one leg for at least 10 seconds is independently associated with a lower all-cause mortality risk. (Click HERE for the source of this stat)

Go back and read that last stat again. If you can stand on one leg for 10 seconds or more without holding onto something, you are not only less likely to fall, but it is also linked to a lower risk of dying from any cause- not just from a fall specifically. 

Adequate balance doesn’t just help us to prevent falls, it’s also an indicator of our overall health. 

Now that I’ve convinced you that being able to stand like a flamingo on one leg is, indeed, and important skill to work on, I’d love to give you 3 practical tips for practicing single leg balance: 

1. Start basic: Stand at your kitchen sink and hold on while you stand on one leg. Once you feel comfortable with this, then you can try holding with just one, or maybe without either, hand. I always recommend you keep your hands “hovering” over a sturdy surface, such as your kitchen sink or counter, just in case you start to lose your balance, because this way you can quickly touch down or grab with your hands to keep yourself safe if need be. If this is too challenging for you, there are plenty of ways you can still work on single leg balance! Watch this video for 4 exercises you can try so you can better stand on one leg: click HERE to watch it on Instagram or click HERE to watch it on Facebook. 

2. Keep your knee soft: You don’t want to “lock out” the knee of the leg that you are standing on, meaning, you don’t want the knee to be perfectly straight. You want a soft bend in the knee that you’re standing on, and this is for several reasons. First, it encourages circulation so blood doesn’t pool in your lower leg and cause you to feel faint. Second, it forces your knee joint to communicate more with your brain about the position of your leg, so you get more benefits from the exercise. When our knees are “locked” straight, the knee and brain don’t have to talk much because your brain can just rely on the stability of the joint being locked out. With a slight bend in the knee, that’s not the case, so your brain has to be in constant communication with that knee joint, which means that you get a lot more proprioceptive training and benefit out of this exercise. Third, it forces your quadriceps muscle (the large muscle in the front of your thigh) to be active. If your knee is locked straight, the quad can easily be lazy and turn off, because it doesn’t have to do much to keep your leg stable. When the knee is bent slightly, however, the quad needs to be nice and active in order to keep you standing. So this way, you incorporate a little quad strengthening into your balance exercise as well. Last, standing with the knee slightly bent is simply a better position for the joint itself, because there isn’t all that pressure pushing against the back of your knee joint. 

3. Keep pushing yourself: Once you get more comfortable with standing on one leg, you’ll want to move to the next level so that you continue to challenge yourself. You have a lot of options, but I like to encourage standing on one leg on an unsteady surface, such as a balance pad, a pillow, or a couch cushion. This will feel a lot harder for most people, so again, you’ll want to practice this while standing next to your kitchen sink or counter for safety. Another option is to move your head side-to-side, or up-and-down, while you’re standing on one leg. This will be more difficult because it will challenge your vestibular system as well. Your goal is to find the happy medium so that you feel challenged, but it's not so difficult that you can’t do the exercise at all. 

Read more about set up and safety considerations when practicing any balance exercise, including single leg balance, by clicking HERE.

References: 

1. Vellas BJ, Wayne SJ, Romero L, Baumgartner RN, Rubenstein LZ, Garry PJ. One‐Leg balance is an important predictor of injurious falls in older persons. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society [Internet]. 1997 Jun 1;45(6):735–8.

2. Araujo CG, De Souza E Silva CG, Laukkanen JA, Singh MF, Kunutsor SK, Myers J, et al. Successful 10-second one-legged stance performance predicts survival in middle-aged and older individuals. British Journal of Sports Medicine [Internet]. 2022 Jun 21;56(17):975–80.