A Guide to Better Balance & Stability

Has this ever happened to you? You go to step sideways out of the way and stumble, or reach across your body and yowch!. . . a muscle cramp. Like your body just wasn't quite ready for that direction.

That's lateral movement. It’s a plane our bodies don’t move in enough.

Sitting at our desk most of the day, staring at our computers, daily routines that involve forward-facing movement, our bodies start to organize around the absence of side to side movement. This means areas that aren’t moving get stiff and tight.

More Than Forward & Back

Think about how a child moves. They scramble sideways, twist, reach across themselves, lunge in every direction without a second thought. Movement is omnidirectional, joyful, instinctive.

As adults, most of our intentional movement tends to happen on one plane. We walk forward. We sit down and stand up. We reach in front of us. Even in fitness spaces, we tend to favor the sagittal plane: squats, lunges, deadlifts, forward folds. All useful, all important, all pointing in the same direction.

The lateral plane, side-to-side movement, is the one that tends to get skipped and we’re missing out on the benefits of mobility by not incorporating it. 

The Side Body Matters…Alot

The side body is much more than a collection of muscles. It's a whole connected line from the outer hip and IT band, up through the obliques, into the intercostals (the small muscles between your ribs), all the way to the lats and into the shoulder. Anatomists sometimes call this the lateral line, and when it's mobile and responsive, the whole body moves with more ease and stability.

When the line becomes tight or underused, the effects show up in familiar places. Hips feel stuck, the waist feels compressed, breathing feels shallow. A general sense of stiffness through the middle.

Traditional Chinese Medicine has been describing this territory for thousands of years, using a different map. The Gallbladder meridian runs along the entire lateral line of the body, from the outer corner of the eye, down through the neck and shoulder, along the side of the ribcage and hip, and all the way down the outer leg to the fourth toe. In TCM, the Gallbladder meridian governs decision-making, flexibility, and the ability to move forward in life. Physically, when it's congested or restricted, people often experience tension through the outer hips and IT band, tightness along the side of the neck, and a general sense of rigidity through the whole lateral chain.

The inner thighs have their own story. The Liver and Spleen meridians both travel up the inner leg, through the groin, and into the torso. The Liver meridian in particular is associated with the smooth flow of energy through the body, and with our capacity for ease and adaptability. Tightness along the inner thighs often shows up alongside feelings of stress or frustration, and opening this area can bring a sense of release that goes well beyond the physical stretch.

This is one of the reasons a good hip opener or a long hold in butterfly pose (Baddha Konasana) can feel so unexpectedly emotional. You're working along pathways that TCM considers deeply connected to how we process and move through experience.

So whether you relate more to the fascial anatomy or the meridian map, both frameworks are pointing at the same thing: the side body is a through-line, and when it's open we can move more freely. 

It Matters More as We Age

A hard truth about aging and movement is we tend to lose what we stop using. Mobility, strength, and coordination all need consistent input to stay available to us. And lateral movement, being the least practiced, is often the first to go.

The signs are subtle at first. A little more hesitation when stepping sideways off a curb. More effort to reach across the body. A sense that the hips are less cooperative than they used to be. Over time, though, these small things add up, and they have a real impact on confidence, independence, and how we feel in our own bodies day to day.

Balance is one of the biggest pieces of this. Our ability to balance depends heavily on hip stability, and hip stability depends on the muscles that control lateral movement: the glutes, the hip abductors, the deep stabilizers of the pelvis. When these muscles are strong and well-coordinated, the body responds quickly and confidently. When they're underworked, that response slows down.

Falls are one of the leading causes of injury in older adults, and many happen in lateral moments: reaching sideways, stepping to one side, catching yourself mid-stumble. Building lateral strength and coordination is one of the most practical things we can do for long-term safety and ease.

The spine is worth mentioning here too. Spinal health in aging is about maintaining movement in all directions, and lateral flexion, simple side bending, is one of the ranges of motion that tends to disappear first. Keeping that range alive supports better breathing, more fluid movement, and a spine that stays responsive for longer.

It Just Feels Good

Beyond all the biomechanics, there's something about moving sideways that just feels good.

A long side stretch after a day at the desk. Gate pose when your hips have been still for too long. Bananasana, lying in a long crescent shape, at the end of a practice. These are a kind of relief. The body recognizes them as something it's been waiting for.

There's a reason so many traditions associate the side body with breath, with expansion, with the feeling of taking up space. When we open through the waist and ribs, the breath tends to follow, moving wide and freely. And with that often comes a sense of ease that's hard to manufacture any other way.

A lot of women especially tend to hold tension through the hips, side waist, pulled in, contained, taking up less room. Lateral movement is almost a physical practice of the opposite: expanding outward, creating space, inhabiting the full width of the body. There's something genuinely liberating about that.

Keep It Simple

You really don't need to do anything extreme here. Lateral movement responds beautifully to gentle, consistent attention. 

Side bends in a seated position. A slow side lung (Skandasana), shifting weight side to side in a wide-legged stance. Lying in Bananasana for a few minutes. Gate pose. Triangle. A simple side-lying leg lift.

These require nothing fancy. What they require is showing up to the side body with the same care and intention we bring to everything else. A few minutes, a few times a week, done with attention. That's genuinely enough to make a difference. 

In my yoga classes, we move in all planes of movement to keep the body mobile and agile. If I don’t have time for a full yoga practice, there’s a short sequence I do that involves twisting, side bending, side lunging, and balancing. It takes as little as 5 minutes and it’s energizing, expansive and leaves me feeling confident.

The body is remarkably responsive when we give it something to work with.

One Last Thing

We tend to think of aging well as maintenance, holding on to what we have. But lateral movement offers something more interesting than that. It allows us to move into parts of ourselves we've been ignoring, to create space where there was compression, to find steadiness in directions we haven't practiced.

There's something worth sitting with in that. The antidote to stiffness isn't always more of what we already do. Sometimes it's a willingness to move in the directions we've been skipping.

Join me for a yoga class where you will experience more lateral movements, improve stability and balance. See you soon!