Unstable Training Devices

One of the hardest parts about being an instructor of any kind is dealing with fads, gadgets and gimmicks. Regardless of whether you’re teaching golf or the piano, every day you’ll get a student or prospective student who will approach you asking why you don’t incorporate this or that new gadget into their training routine.

What student’s of each discipline need to understand is that gadgets and gimmicks rarely exist to improve on anything, and are usually invented to make money off of gullible people. I’m not going to try to debunk all of the fitness gimmicks in this article (that would take a book), but I am going to delve a little into the why and why not’s of various balance devices and unstable training surfaces.

What I’m talking about is the various balls, boards, and other unstable devices which the client sits or stands on while doing an exercise. Most of these devices came from physical therapy clinics, where they are more properly used by the therapists for entirely different reasons. They have become very popular recently with trainers, and it seems some excellent and experienced trainers are being viewed as “old school” for not using these devices. Some less than educated trainers do almost their entire sessions with their clients on top of these devices. Trainers will use these devices for a couple reasons.

For the most part trainers use balance devices because they look cool and they’re cheep compared to real exercise equipment, but I’ll be a little less pessimistic for a minute and talk about the slightly more relevant reasons they use them:

First of all, when an exercise is performed on a balance device, it then becomes even more complicated and difficult. Isn’t that always a good thing? Well, not really, at least not all the time. You see this is where the purveyors of gadgets and gimmicks fall short. See, there’s this thing called “Exercise Science”! Yep, people actually do studies on this stuff, and you’d be amazed at what you can learn if you actually take the time to be an educated trainer (deep sarcasm intended).

Actually, the more unstable the body is during an exercise, the more the brain shuts down the muscle that is most responsible for the movement. So, lets say you do a standard squat. In that exercise, the quads, glutes, etc, get a major workout. Now, do the same exercise on top of a bosu ball, and these big muscles only fire at half their potential, and therefore don’t get near the workout. Instead, smaller stabilizing muscles will get a much greater workout, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but if the majority of your workout is done this way, you will not get nearly as good of a workout for the big muscles (the ones you actually see, and do most of the work, and burn most of the calories).

Let me give an example of how we might utilize unstable surfaces here at Fitness Together. Take the barbell bench press: In its normal form it works the chest, tri’s, and front of the shoulder as the prime movers. Many other muscles are involved to support and balance the bar. If you do this exercise with dumbbells instead of a barbell, you will notice you can’t do near as much weight. This is primarily because your brain is inhibiting the big muscles to protect the smaller stabilizers since the dumbbells aren’t as stable as the bar. Then, if you attempt this exercise on top of a swiss ball, you will have to use even lighter dumbbells. This is great if you are concentrating solely on the stabilizers, but not so great if you want to really hit the chest, tri’s and delts.

On the flip side, why not use machines for all our exercises? Wouldn’t the stabilizing effect of the machines really allow us to hit the big muscles? Perhaps, and maybe that’s why you’ll see amateur body builders and others who aren’t interested in having “functional” muscles using machines. In my mind, though, the stabilizing effect of machines ignores the important roll of the stabilizing muscles without greatly adding to the training of the bigger muscles. Machines also force your body to function along a preset line of action, which greatly increase the chances for overuse injuries.

There is a fine line between proper use of unstable training and excessive mis-use. In the example above, I recommend that my trainers use the barbell bench press as the main compound pushing movement, with dumbbell presses used every couple of workouts, and maybe the swiss ball version every once in a while or as an ancillary movement for special stabilizer training.

Another reason balance training is often used by the uneducated trainer is to improve sports performance. Unfortunately, in the majority of cases, this is also refuted by exercise science. Studies have repeatedly demonstrated that the body does not improve its ability to balance on a steady surface by practicing on an unstable surface. In fact, a few studies have suggested that training on an unstable surface may actually decrease performance on a stable surface, and let's face it, the vast majority of sports are performed on solid ground.

This actually makes sense when you think about all that goes into balance. Your eyes, inner ears, and muscle proprieceptors all coordinate to allow your brain to balance properly. Throw one of these signals out of whack (which is what you’re doing on an unstable surface) and your body will decondition its normal balance mechanism. So, practicing your golf swing on top of an unstable surface will probably not help your swing anywhere but on the deck of a cruise ship out at sea (unstable surface).

Now, if you’re developing your balance skills for snowboarding (unstable environment), then a balance board of some sort may be perfect training. As usual, you (or your trainer) needs to evaluate why something is done, not just whether it looks neat or whether everyone else is doing it!!!