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Falls Prevention Week: Prevention Requires Practice When we talk about falls prevention, we're not simply talking about avoiding falls. We're talking about developing the skills that help us stay upright when our balance is challenged. In simple terms, to prevent falls we need to practice not falling over! Seated exercise classes have an important role to play. They can improve strength, mobility, confidence and general fitness. However, falls prevention also requires people to train in positions where balance is actively challenged. Real-life falls rarely happen while sitting down. They happen when we're standing, walking, turning, reaching or changing direction. Effective falls prevention includes activities that help us:
This Falls Prevention Week, let's remember that awareness is important, but prevention comes through action. Building strength matters, but so does practising the movements and balance strategies that help us stay steady on our feet every day. Because falls prevention isn't just about exercising. It's about giving people the confidence, balance and reactions they need to stay active, independent and safe.  While refreshing my website recently, I found myself thinking about a simple question:
What do I really do? The obvious answer is that I teach exercise classes. But the more I reflected, the more I realised that movement has always been about much more than exercise. Movement helps us maintain our confidence, independence and connection with others. It enables us to continue doing the things we enjoy and supports both physical and emotional wellbeing. Throughout my career, I have been fortunate to work both on the church hall floor and in the board room. These experiences have strengthened my belief that movement, dance and physical activity are not simply optional extras. They are powerful tools that help people live healthier, happier and more fulfilling lives. As a Chartered Senior Practitioner, Physical Activity & Health Specialist and community-based instructor, I know that professional knowledge and qualifications matter. They help ensure that classes are safe, effective and appropriate for the people taking part. Equally important, however, are kindness, encouragement and understanding the individuals in front of us. Every participant brings their own experiences, abilities and goals, and every one of them deserves to feel welcome. For more than 25 years, I have had the privilege of helping people discover what their bodies can do. Whether that is improving balance, restoring confidence after illness, making new friends, or simply enjoying an hour of movement and music, those moments are what make teaching so rewarding. At the heart of everything I do is a simple belief: Movement is not just exercise. It is confidence, connection, independence and joy. RESILIENCE. A Facebook memory from September 3rd 2015. All those years ago, I viewed resilience through the lens of mechanics— bouncing a Medau ball. When the ball hits the floor, compressive stress momentarily flattens it. It stores kinetic energy like a spring before releasing it upward. Push the ball down in the right spot with the right amount of push, and it returns to your hands. You can push it back down again, creating a perpetual reuse of energy and flowing movement. Or, you can allow it to rest in your hands—and it will lose its energy. Change the position of your hands- push in a different direction or lift into the air, let it drop - rebound- and use the energy to pivot and to keep the movement going. Roll on to 2020, and I looked at resilience through entirely different eyes: how an organisation anticipated, absorbed, adapted, and recovered when faced with multiple disruptions and the usual pivot did not have sufficient turning power! Resilience was exhausting—everything was pushing and pulling, making it practically impossible to store energy for the next thing. Today, resilience isn't just about encouraging a flowing movement in a Medau class or navigating ever-evolving, unforeseen crises. True resilience is not just mechanical or emotional elasticity. When a crisis hits, do we see brick walls, or can we find ways to climb over them—or around them? Do we see open doors, or only partially closed ones? Employing resilience takes deliberate practice: • Slowing down. • Picking things apart. • Truly understanding what is happening beneath the surface. We can't just bounce back to the old way of doing things. We anticipate, using lessons from previous experiences, to bounce forward.  My EMD UK membership renewal landed in my inbox this week — a reminder that my CIMSPA renewal isn’t far behind, and that it’s time to gather certificates and check my CPD. It made me reflect on the value of CPD itself. Are we doing CPD simply to meet membership requirements? Or are we choosing learning that genuinely helps us grow? My CIMSPA membership has opened doors to courses I might never have explored. Some strengthened existing skills; others filled gaps I didn’t know were there. What I need to learn next always depends on where I am and where I’m heading. Every course — from Fitpro courses on Parkinson's and sciatica and unendorsed online workshops on osteoporosis and falls awareness — along with conversations, learning and teaching experiences, adds something to my toolbox. Another skill, another perspective, another way to support the people I work with. Ultimately, CPD shouldn’t just be about maintaining membership or collecting 10 points a year. I have exceeded my required points this year- because CPD should be about becoming better at what we do - matching learning with those in our classes as well as developing ourselves as teachers.  |
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September 2026
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