Perspective: You Can't Fully Train Strength on Unstable Surfaces
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- Опубликовано: 2 окт 2024
- Our industry seems have an obsession with wobbly toys and unstable surfaces. Although these devices MAY offer an appropriate stimulus for certain goals, STRENGTH isn't one of them.
You must have a stable base to train and/or exhibit strength.
Trainer to the Trainers®, Tom Purvis (tompurvis.com) from the Resistance Training Specialist Program (RTS) discusses this topic here
For live courses and in-depth exploration of exercise mechanics, you can visit RTS at www.RTS123.com
*a PTDC admin may respond to comments, but the Instructor in video will not, so please keep that in mind before you comment!!!*
Thankyou for all of your videos. I've used several of them as visual aids for my own blog and they're invaluable! Concise, erudite and easy to assimilate. Please, keep putting your knowledge out there and I hope you reach a wide audience.
I would love to see you do a piece on arthrogenic muscle inhibition and how that should be considered when rehabilitating and training joint-injured athletes.
extremely informative, thank you for these videos
What is your opinion on whole body vibration platforms, specifically for the purpose of muscle hypertrophy?
I love these videos, they give me confidence that I'm on the right path with my clients.
I much prefer to use loaded carries, like the farmers walk over bosu balls any day, I defy anyone to tell me they have stronger feet or ankles from balancing on an unstable surface than a guy who carries his bodyweight in each hand for 10 x 50 ft. Proprioception is software training, you're just making your brain better at telling the muscles what to do. This doesn't mean that you're stronger.
the bosu balls helped me with my stability and awareness with my left leg. I can pivot more efficiently.
I agree with almost everything you said, but I'm a little hesitant on what you mentioned about balance on a wobbly surfaces (of course not with other exercises simultaneously). A single leg stance on a wobbly surface should contract accessory muscles via reflexes. I don't really think the main focus on this exercise is necessarily strength, but I think it is more about trying to get muscles that maybe aren't being used due to overcompensation by stronger muscles, more neural output. My understanding on the wobbly surface is to attempt to activate accessory stabilizing muscles that may be under firing.
And the population I'm more referring to is geriatrics.
thumbs up
I don't disagree with what you're saying, you make a lot of great points. But wouldn't accessory balance work (e.g. duradisk balancing) reduce power leakage-or to put it another way, the force you can generate in say for example a vertical jump-because it would train your CNS and the muscles innervated for stability and coordination that are a part of jumping vertically? Thus meaning training for power (which is part strength) can be aided by unstable training.
Jarrod Cugley Ultimately, if your goal is to improve efficiency at a specific motor task (from a *neurological* perspective), you'll want to spend a significant amount of time practicing that motor task in an environment that approximates the expected performance conditions as much as possible. If your goal is to improve vertical jump on solid ground, the best way to teach the nervous system how to generate force efficiently in *that* scenario is to practice it on solid ground. Same goes for strengthening of the tissues through various exercises that apply strategic resistance (be it free weights, cables, etc.).
The "stability" and "coordination" you speak of are going to be fairly specific to the task you want stability in (at least as far as training the body for gross stability on a wobbly thing goes). Put another way, any potential reduction in "power leakage" would only likely manifest in tasks that provide the CNS with the same or a very similar stimulus -- this goes for the joint positions in question, the movement of the surface the foot is on, the relative weight on the foot at a given time, and all of the forces acting on not just the local segments (the foot, knee, etc.) but on the body as a whole.
In terms of doing a more "general" exercise to make the body more stable in force output for a power task like a jump or sprint, etc., your best bet is actually to improve the integrity of the tissues within the joints (as Tom stated in the video). That means improving strength at each joint so that when called upon, the CNS has more "physical" capabilities to call upon. So as opposed to trying to prime the nervous system "software" for all sorts of wobbly contingencies, prepare the "hardware" by improving the strength of the muscles required to create stable relationships between all of the body segments needed for the task (which more often than not, involves just about every segment in the body to some degree).
I hope that made some sense. Your question was certainly a good one, and it's understandable to anyone who hasn't taken a lot of time to consider what is actually going on with these various exercise tasks (I say this as someone who not too long ago believed all sorts of things that don't make much sense after learning more, and I continue to learn every single day).
Cheers :)
Geoffrey Futch Apologies for the novel, btw. I type fast and think fast, and sometimes things get a lot longer than intended.
I've seen people in the gym bench press with their legs elevated off the ground, and they claim to hit the "core" while doing chest. Isn't that bad for the spine?