NEW ADVICE FOR preventing falls in older people. I think that things that involve practicing balance are very valuable. I’ve always had excellent balance, but I no longer do the stuff I did as a kid and when I did a balance-intensive routine at the gym a while back — involving standing on balls and the like — the two things that struck me were how much worse my balance was when I started than it was when I was a kid, and how rapidly it improved. I could almost feel the neural networks recalibrating between sets.