Balance board
device used as a circus skill
A balance board is a device used as a circus skill, for recreation, balance training, athletic training, brain development, therapy, musical training and other kinds of personal development.
It is a lever similar to a see-saw that the user usually stands on, usually with the left and right foot at opposite ends of the board. The user's body must stay balanced enough to keep the board's edges from touching the ground and to keep from falling off the board.
A different challenge is presented by each of the five basic types of balance boards and their subtypes. Some of them can be attempted successfully by three-year-olds and elderly people, and some, because of their steepness and speed, are difficult and dangerous for professional athletes.
In their design, what differentiates the five types (and their subtypes) is how unstable each of them is, i.e., in how many and in which of the three dimensions of space each board turns and/or sways and how freely its fulcrum contacts the board and the ground.
Uses and users
In 1953, Stanley Washburn Jr. filed a patent for a balance board with the intention of its use for recreation. These boards quickly become popular for skiers and surfers to practice their balancing skills in the off season or when natural conditions were poor. The balance board is a device that has come to be used for training in sports and martial arts, for physical fitness and for non-athletic purposes that are listed here.
“Balance board” enters the record as device used as a circus skill. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Balance, board and device can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Balance board” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Balance, board and device provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 9, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q1972341. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1953.
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This entry incorporates text from “Balance board” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.