The infinity walk: the exercise that brings together coordination, balance and proprioception

1/4h LabO #251, Watch the episode on YouTube

A single path on the floor, shaped like a figure 8, that forces proprioception, the vestibular system and vision to work together in the middle of movement. The infinity walk is the integrative exercise that serves the elite athlete just as well as the elderly person in rehabilitation. Here is what it is, why the brain loves it, and how to program it depending on the person you work with.

Introduction

A handball player traces a figure 8 on the floor. His gaze stays locked on one point while his body pivots, changes direction, receives a ball at the center of the figure and passes it back to a partner. Everything moves, except his eyes. This scene condenses what is at play in the infinity walk, and what so often gives way in real life: on the field as in everyday life, we move while keeping a target in our gaze, and it is this cooperation between the senses that breaks down as soon as things speed up.

The figure 8 gives no respite. It forces the body to readjust constantly in an unstable environment, and forces three systems to collaborate: proprioception, the vestibular system and vision. That is why an exercise invented in the 1980s is found today in elite physical preparation as well as in nursing homes, with the child building his motor skills as with the patient in post-stroke rehabilitation. We will see what it is, why the brain and the body love it, and above all how to program it concretely depending on the person you work with.

1. What is the infinity walk?

The infinity walk is a walking pattern shaped like a figure 8, a lemniscate. You follow this path on the floor, and the geometry of the figure forces you to walk or run continuously, never settling on a straight line. The trajectory keeps turning, so the body never stops adjusting its foot placements and managing its balance against gravity, dynamically.

We owe this figure to Deborah Sunbeck (S-U-N-B-E-C-K), who invented it in the 1980s to improve coordination in general. She even wrote a book from it, available on Amazon: type her name and you will find it. Since then, the exercise has been adopted in sport and in rehabilitation for its effects on the brain and the neuromotor system. A few small studies have come out around it, some on stroke, others that looked at what it did at the proprioceptive level.

One moment really launched the practice: Covid. During lockdown, going out was impossible, so athletes practiced the infinity walk a great deal, often in a garden. The figure was easy to set up and allowed work on changes of direction, sprint-type work intervals, and physical conditioning. You run in loops on your 8, and you chain them together.

If you want to visualize it, simply type "infinity walk" on YouTube: you will find demonstrations and variations there. Describing a path on the floor in audio quickly reaches its limits, so video helps.

2. Why the figure 8 is so powerful for the brain

Three main reasons explain why this figure works so well, plus a fourth element that kicks in as soon as you make things more complex: neural plasticity. Let's unpack them.

Bilateral engagement and hemisphere synchronization

The crossed path of the 8 calls on both sides of the body in alternation and engages the brain bilaterally. Concretely, it promotes the synchronization of the two cerebral hemispheres. You do not work one side in isolation: the shape forces you to pass from one lobe of the figure to the other, and motor control follows. This is one of the coordination benefits the exercise puts forward.

The vestibulo-ocular reflex

The vestibulo-ocular reflex is your ability to keep your gaze fixed on a target while your head and body move. Exactly what happens in team sports: your body turns, translates, repositions, while your eyes stay locked on one point, the ball, an opponent, a teammate. You are in motion and you keep your target in your gaze, or you follow a moving target such as the trajectory of a ball.

In the infinity walk, you reproduce this constraint: a fixed point in front of you, and the body following the 8. Activating the reflex this way improves visual stability and postural control. And it is not only useful on a field, it runs constantly in everyday life.

Proprioception

Proprioception is the awareness of your body in space and in time. It is largely mediated by mechanoreceptors. When we widen the scope to touch and the rest, we speak rather of somatosensation, but proprioception in the strict sense remains tied to these receptors. By moving along a path that changes continuously, you train this ability to feel where your segments are and how they are moving.

When you start adding the cognitive and making the exercise more complex, a fourth mechanism comes into play: neural plasticity, the development of new connections. You force the brain and the body to work together in an unstable environment, then you gradually raise the difficulty. Result: better coordination, more agility, and a mitigated injury risk. We are not talking about avoiding injury, but about mitigating it.

3. Balance, vestibular system, proprioception: the exercise that integrates the three senses

This is the heart of the matter. When you walk or run your 8, you stimulate the whole vestibular system. We have already talked about the vestibulo-ocular reflex, but there is also the vestibulospinal one, which manages the tone of the extensors and posture relative to gravity, and the vestibulocollic one. In short, the whole set of vestibular nuclei is called on by the infinity walk, the infinity run and their variations. In parallel, you develop proprioception, and a study has even come out on sensory reweighting at the proprioceptive level, with a form of sensory adaptation.

At LabO RNP, we put a lot of emphasis on the work of calibrating the senses, around three main axes. First axis: proprioception, which we train and calibrate. Second axis: the vestibular system, that is, the physical quality of balance. Third axis: sports vision, the ability to take in information on the field and to use your oculomotor muscles to move your eyes in the best possible way and pick up the right information.

There remains a fourth axis, and it is the one that changes everything: the integration of the previous three. Because in everyday life, proprioception (or more broadly somatosensation), the vestibular sense and the visual sense never each work in their own corner. They work together, at the same time. The infinity walk is an excellent integrative exercise for these three senses.

Hence the programming logic. You can work each system analytically: train your vestibular balance in isolation, work your vestibulo-ocular reflex in a targeted way, work your cervical somatosensation separately. Then you put together a bundle of all of that, you integrate the whole into an infinity walk. You put back this integration that belongs to real life, valid for everyone: the average person, a child, an older adult, an athlete, a patient in rehabilitation. A single exercise brings the three senses together, as close as possible to what we actually do when we move.

4. The levels of practice: from the path to the cognitive task

Before adding anything, you must master the figure. With us, there are three main routes, three ways of performing the infinity walk, and all three must be mastered.

Level 1: master the shape of the 8

You start with the path alone, following the trace on the floor: passing behind, passing in front, and with the 90-degree and 180-degree variations. Throughout, you keep a fixed point in front of you, a point you fix your gaze on and do not let go of. Your body moves under a gaze that stays stable on the target.

At this level, the goal is simple, and you must not rush the steps: concentrate on ground contact and the fluidity of the movement. If you cannot find the paths on video, you can write to LabO RNP on Instagram, and we will send you one or two examples.

Intermediate level: add load

Once the shape is acquired, you add a cognitive task. For example, you walk your 8, in one of the three forms, counting backward from 100 to 0, by 3s. This is exactly what I had an older person do: in the evening in front of the TV, during the commercial breaks, she performed one of the three variations for the whole length of the break, counting backward by 3s, while looking at the screen.

You can also make the target mobile. The idea remains to fixate an object, but if that object moves, the task becomes more complex. You can also vary the floor. With older people, in a fall-prevention logic, once they were comfortable we placed gym mats: a hard floor, then a softer floor with a mat, then a very soft double mat. We changed the structure of the floor to add difficulty.

Another tool: the aquabag. It is a tube half filled with water, the equivalent of barely 3 to 4 kilos. You put it on the back, and as soon as the person leans to one side, the water moves to that side and accentuates the imbalance. The imbalances caused by the person's movement are amplified by the movement of the water, which is very interesting from the point of view of motor learning.

5. The infinity run: changes of direction and dual task for athletes

The advanced level, which we use a great deal with athletes, is integration into the sport and above all the move to running. Instead of walking, you run your 8, in one of the three forms, chaining rapid changes of direction, at different speeds depending on what you want to work on. You think exactly as you would to develop change of direction, linear speed or acceleration: work blocks, rest times, targeted intensity.

You then add ball handling. The handball player performs the infinity run and, as soon as he reaches the center of the infinity sign, he receives a ball that he must pass back to his teammates, while fixating the teammate or a point behind. Think of the basketball player who fixes his point and moves in an 8 while dribbling. Think of the soccer player dribbling, who fixes a point and takes in information at the same time. We stack object manipulation on top of the path and the fixed gaze.

We can go up another notch in the cognitive. We did it with a soccer player: dribbling in an 8, gaze fixed, and at the same time a tennis ball that he spins around his waist. Then he managed to do his dribbling in an 8 while fixating a target, spinning the ball around his waist, and performing calculations: someone facing him showed a number of fingers with the right hand and the left hand, and he had to multiply the two. We are at triple, even quadruple task.

The stated goal is not the feat for its own sake. It is to complete as many laps, over 30 seconds of work, with all these tasks at the same time as when he simply fixes a point and dribbles. In other words, you add cognitive load and you try to hold the same distance and the same quality of trajectory despite everything. For strength and conditioning coaches, you can also work under constraint: while the person runs his 8, you pull him with elastic bands in different directions to destabilize the movement. When the resistance is placed on the basis of an assessment and real thought, it leads to precise motor learning.

6. Programming the infinity walk according to your audience and your goals

The exercise fits in several places in the session. You can put it in the warm-up, in a technical phase, in active recovery between sets of sprints, or even in a physical conditioning session. As for dosage, 5 minutes per session, sometimes 10, are enough to see results over a cycle of 3 to 4 weeks. It is progressive, it does not happen in a snap of the fingers, but it is quick to set up. And it can be done almost anywhere, even in a very small space, at any time, including in front of the TV during the commercials.

The great appeal of this category of exercises is its modularity. Depending on how you modulate the difficulty, it is one of the few exercises that works equally for the elite athlete, for rehabilitation, for the child or for the older adult. It creates a very complete mind-body connection, and you can push the dual task very far, or rather the cognitive multiplication of tasks. With athletes, we include it every week, in the warm-up as in conditioning. Concretely, it fits team sports, combat sports, trail, running, seniors and fall prevention, children's motor development, and rehabilitation, including post-stroke where studies have come out.

For LabO RNP students, individualization goes through the assessment. In a linear or block programming, you first gradually increase the volume on analytical exercises with simple stimulation, then comes the moment when you look for integration and complexification. The infinity walk is precisely a tool for that. Two concrete examples: if you have worked on the oculomotor function of the right eye, you can perform the infinity walk with a patch on the left eye. If you have run a whole analytical cycle on the right horizontal vestibular canal, you choose a variation that, from the point of view of sensory reweighting, stimulates this canal in particular: for example, analytical stimulations of the right horizontal canal chained into an infinity run, with changes of rhythm placed at the precise moment when the changes of direction call on this canal. The variation matches the person's needs and what was worked on in the previous cycles.

FAQ

Why take an interest in the infinity walk?

Because it is an integration exercise that brings together coordination, balance, proprioception and vision in a single movement, in an unstable environment close to real life. You work on the synchronization of the two hemispheres, the vestibulo-ocular reflex and the awareness of the body in space, then you transfer that to sport and daily life. It is also one of the few exercises that can be modulated from the elite athlete all the way to rehabilitation.

Why does an athlete perform well in training but fall apart in competition?

Because in a real situation, you have to hold the quality of the movement while the body moves, changes direction and keeps a target in the gaze, all with added cognitive load. This is where the vestibulo-ocular reflex comes in: keeping the gaze fixed on the ball or the opponent while everything pivots. The infinity run trains exactly that. The goal is to achieve the same distance and the same quality of trajectory with the added tasks as without them, so that competition no longer makes coordination break down.

Who invented the infinity walk?

Deborah Sunbeck, in the 1980s, to improve coordination in general. She turned it into a book, available on Amazon by typing her name (S-U-N-B-E-C-K).

How long do you need to practice to see results?

5 minutes per session are enough, sometimes 10 depending on the use, over a cycle of 3 to 4 weeks. Results are progressive, it does not happen in a snap of the fingers, but the exercise is quick to fit in and can be done almost anywhere.

Is the infinity walk suitable for seniors and rehabilitation?

Yes. It is used with older people in a fall-prevention logic, and studies have come out on post-stroke rehabilitation. It also serves children's motor development and athlete training. It all comes down to modulating the difficulty: cognitive task, floor variation, moving target, aquabag, running and dual task depending on the audience.

Related articles

• Infinity walk: the exercise that trains coordination, balance and proprioception at the same time

• Sensorimotor integration, the engine of athletic performance

• Motor coordination exercises: the real rules nobody explains to you

• Proprioception exercises: working beyond the mechanoreceptors

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