The SIMPLE Early Warning System For Runners 

We'd love to know what your number is. Let us know your time in the comments below...

Some middle ground between eyes open and closed is doing it with your eyes open, whilst moving your head from side to side. Improving your time like this should improve yout time with your eyes closed.

Eyes closed - i can manage circa 15 sec, eyes open - over 2 mins !

LOL, less than 10 seconds, no wonder I'm injury prone. I can do it forever with my eyes open, but as soon as I close them I lose balance.

Fantastic concepts! Thanks for your content! Greetings from Argentina!

I am a 61 years old male. With closed eyes, the average of the first 10 test results on the left leg was 20 seconds, on the right leg 25 seconds. Individual test results are all over in the 6 to 62 seconds interval. I did the tests in pairs - the left leg test first then immediately the right leg. I repeated these pairs of tests in 10 different occasions later. The correlation in these left then right leg test results is very strong, 0.78.

66 and stopped after 2 minutes. Going to reach 100 years🙂

I liked this very much. Eyes open I could do 2+ minutes, eyes closed 25 seconds. You didn't say whether eyes should be open or closed. And it would be fun seeing you do the test.

Nope, less than 10 seconds, 63 years old, been running since 5 years old, never had an injury that put me out for more than 3 weeks.

I was definitely not born a stork... lol I have a lot of work to do, I appreciate all the tips!!

I managed 3 seconds standing on left leg. And I've known it has somewhat poor stability for a good while (probably the reason of limited dorsiflexion and ankle pain), but ironically it supports really well in judo, much easier to balance on it while throwing an 80 kg guy with the other foot straight in the air than on the right foot. After some minutes of trying I realized not deliberately standing tall and instead relaxing the joints thinking of being anchored to the floor through the foot allowed for a minute. Especially if you let your hip drop slightly and let your foot drop the weight against the knee, suddenly you're a strong support beam instead of a flimsy flagpole. Also what about jumping on the support foot? The foot on the knee didn't come off and the hands didn't come off the hips, but at times I found the centre of mass tilting so much that the foot wasn't enough and did a couple of hops.

So what can we do about it if we have a low score?

1 day after intervals i was do only 17 sec, 2 days after (after some exercises in home) - 60 sec.

Do eyes have to be closed? It makes a big difference open or closed eyes.

Eyes closed, I fall over immediately! Eyes open, I last 10 seconds on the left leg and only 3 on my right… I think something might be wrong with me!

I'm 72 and can stand for ages on one leg looking out of window at sea and watching birds, but close eyes - no way

The stork test test power, proprioception and stability so the results can vary between barefeet and in shoes and between shoe types. If you have a supportive shoe it may mitigate your barefeet stability issues. Results can vary so I assume that the gold standard for reaching a minimum of 20 seconds and preferably 40 or more is doing it barefeet.

Overpronation runners will have more difficulty to have a high score. Do we need to test both legs ? What happens if one is considerable better then the other in this stance ?

What part of the body is messed up if one fails so easily with eyes closed? Ears??

Eyes open easily over a minute. Eyes closed 20 seconds keeping the pose, up to a minute if I use my arms.

“When you do the stork stand, think of a flamingo” -Coach Parry 2024

eyes closed 30s on the right leg and 11s on the left :P

Can't do more than 0:05 with eyes closed, managed 1:34 with them open

A handy exercise is to stand on one leg whilst you clean your teeth. Right leg one day, left the next. It is tricky but with patience it comes together. To upgrade, try it with your eyes closed too.

I'm doomed 😵

Don’t do this on the ground, do it on a ball. Active balance is better for ankle strength which is the culprit

It's better to put your foot above or below the knee. You shouldn't put that kind of pressure on the side of your very important joint that is not supposed to move in that direction (every good yoga instructor will tell you that, since this is basically tree pose)

This is problematic for a couple of reasons. The good old causations vs correlation. A good Stork stand can be indicative that a certain runner has good proprioception and supporting musculature and vise versa. Although increasing your Stork stand time can be good strength work training Stork stand for the sake of it isn't the most effective way of preventing injury and increasing longevity.