Steady as you go

Can you stand on one leg for 10 seconds? Balance could beamatter of life and death so addressing issues early and improving yours is vital

- Joel Snape

Until we start to lose our U balance, we barely notice that it's there at all. "It starts for a lot of people with simple stuff," says Dr Anna Lowe, an expert on healthy ageing and physical activity. "Maybe you used to be able to quickly stand on one leg to put a shoe on, and you've stopped doing that.

Maybe you used to get out of the bath on to a slippery floor without thinking, and now you have to hold on to something. It's easy to either miss the signs or just put it down to ageing-but it really is something you can affect." The key, it is increasingly becoming clear, is to address the decline before it gets serious: and that can happen earlier than you might think.

What is balance? Perhaps surprisingly, those who deal with it have struggled to settle on a single definition. Technically, it's the complex interaction of several different systems in your body - from muscles, nerves, eyesight and the inner ear to the sensory system that lets you recognise where your body is touching the ground, along with movement receptors within your joints that tell you where your body is in space. It's not something we're born with, but an ability that we gain early and lose over time. Most simply, balance is often defined as the ability to distribute your bodyweight over your base of support-a definition that muddles up movement and physical ability with what other people think of as innate.