For a while now, Gus has been working her way down to squatting to the box. She’s been using bumpers stacked on top to assist while working up to sets of three on the low box. Just a few weeks ago, she needed to hold on to Carmen’s hands to get herself off the box without the bumpers on her “work sets”.
Here she is at her training session last Friday doing a set of 5 off the box with no assistance at all. As she gets better at keeping her weight over her foot, we’ll start working on having her do bodyweight squats without the box.
Balance is an expression of strength. The aged fall because they’re not strong enough to overcome a shift in center of mass relative to the center of balance due to a slip, step, push, or any other reason. Gus hasn’t fallen down in over a year as a direct result of getting stronger.
In addition to the strength work involving squats to a box, rack pulls, bench press, and overhead press, Carmen works with Gus on getting up after a fall. Gus takes the strength she trains regularly and applies it through practice getting up – something that she could not do on her own 8 months ago. Although a relatively subjective measurement, we can tell that she’s improving by how quickly she can go through this exercise.