The Definition of Stability

According to the Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, stability is “the quality or state of something that is not easily changed or likely to change.” Meaning, it is solid in a specific position.

This is not a bad definition, but when it comes to the body it offers us nothing. For the purpose of this article, stability will de defined as “the ability to maintain strength through a full range of motion.” There is no point in being stable in one position if you are unable to maintain that stability while moving.

Sports, especially Brazilian jiu jitsu, are not static. They involve constant movement. If sports involve movement and the definition of stability is a state of something that is not easily changed, why would anyone want to be stable? Instead, what athletes need is to be strong in a full range of motion.

Why Stability Is Important

BJJ requires constant movement in and through a variety of positions. Sometimes you may find yourself standing up and trying to pass your opponent’s guard. Other times you are on your back. During a training session you will switch between positions more times than you can count, so it is important to be stable in every position. A lack of stability means you will have no strength, and even worse, it places you at a higher risk of getting injured.

Let’s look at an example. You’re starting in your opponent’s closed guard. He goes for a hip-bump sweep. To counter, you post a hand on the mat to stop from being swept. Unfortunately, when you post, your hand and your shoulder do not have the strength needed to stabilize. The forces involved in the hip bump and your defense get transferred to some other area of your arm that is it not designed withstand that force – and you end up injurying your shoulder or elbow.

How to Improve Stability

To improve stability you do not need to be balancing on one leg. What you need to do is get strong. Making sure every muscle is strong enough to do the job it was designed to do is key. Muscles that do not function properly will force other muscles around them to work harder. This leads to overuse of those muscles, which makes the whole situation worse.

Add corrective exercises to your training routine to avoid stability issues before they start or to help correct current stability issues. Below are some suggestions of exercises and specific areas to focus based on the needs of a BJJ athlete.

Upper Body

Upside Down Press

Side Lying External Rotations

Seated External Rotations

Lower Body

Single-Leg Step Ups

Rear-Foot Elevated Split Squats

Front Foot Elevated Reverse Lunges

Belt Squat Walks With Resistance Band

Conclusion

In order to be stable, you must be strong. Most people head to the gym and do all the things they are good at. But it’s the things you are not good at that are going to come back to hurt you. Making sure that your program contains corrective exercises will help keep you on the mats performing your best.

Photos by Dan of Earth.

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One of the best pieces of fitness advice I ever received was “not to speak in absolutes.” I know, there are things right now you believe really strongly in and you feel so sure they are right. However, I can tell you from my own experience there will be a time when you say, “Whoops.” You will want the right to say that you evolved, you experienced things, and yes, you grew.

I felt that way when it came to the idea of “stability” training. In the late 1990s I was suffering from a bad back injury. So bad to the point I could barely sit in a chair for any extended period of time. It was at this time that I was first exposed to “corrective exercise,” and I couldn’t have been more interested in the concepts for no other reason to help myself.

Some may remember that “functional training” and “corrective exercise” were largely based off the use of standing on unstable surfaces.

You may laugh now, but the truth is many well-respected coaches and fitness professionals used these methods. It made a lot of sense, when we stood on these unstable objects it was very hard to perform many movements. We assumed that was a great indicator that we had a lot of instabilities preventing us from better performance and hindering our strength gains.

As time passed, I found the end results less than impressive. I didn’t need a lot of scientific studies to show me that I really didn’t get any stronger. Although I practiced many of these “stability” concepts, the transfer to other lifts or performance didn’t seem to be evident.

A few years would go by and then the research would start to show the same thing. Standing on unstable surfaces didn’t do much to improve “core” strengthor overall force production.¹ The lack of results that I personally saw and the growing scientific evidence made me do a full 180.

Heavy weight was the answer! Lifting hard and heavy was the cure-all. In following my new philosophy, I thought this idea of “stability” was both silly and unnecessary.

Stability training wasn’t the answer. It had to be about lifting heavy on big lifts all the time. I knew this had to be the answer! After all, I got much stronger. But there, too, was a wall.

As I continued to work on getting “stronger,” the more and more gear I found myself wearing. It started off with finding an excuse to use a lifting belt because I was “maxing out,” then it was adding knee sleeves because you need that stuff if you are going to lift heavy, you know.

“Warm ups” were really becoming rehab sessions because everything hurt so bad. Elbows, low back, – oh, it was probably easier to name things that didn’t hurt.

It made me think again. Had I fallen into the classic “overreaction, under reaction” paradigm? Did stability training really have a place and was it even the biggest weakness I possessed? Was I wrong not in my stability training, but in the manner in which I had been applying it to my programs?

Re-Examining Stability Training

One of the biggest mistakes I made early on in my use of stability training was not realizing there is a difference between the stability of a specific joint versus whole-body stability.

Whole-body stability refers to more of the center of mass of the body altering over the base of support, while joint stability is, “the ability to maintain or control joint movement or position.”

Huh? What I was doing wrong with my initial effort with unstable surfaces was actually challenging my ankle and foot stability and thinking it correlated to the stability of my entire body.

The problem was that the huge amount of instability coming from my foot and ankle made my body work so hard that it could not create any force or develop strength.

What I learned, and hope to share with you, is that whole-body stability is important and needs to be as progressive as load, volume, and any other training variables.

For the sake of this article, I’m going to focus on whole-body stability. After all, that is what I was trying to improve with the idea of standing on unstable surface training.

Better Stability Training

The big question is why you should care about stability training. My experience with myself and my many clients may not be compelling enough to make you spend time giving stability training serious thought.

Truly effective training comes through understanding that some important concepts and skills be established.

The following is the recommended progression from spinal expert Dr. Stuart McGill.

• Good Motor Patterns: Highly coordinated and efficient movement skills
• Stability: Building stability of both joints and whole body
• Endurance: Strength coaches have long used “anatomical adaptation” or general physical preparation as a means to lay a foundation for higher intensity strength work
• Strength: Not just to see how much you can lift, but teaching the body how to coordinate, connect, and utilize the natural chains in the body
• Power and Agility: Performance specific training methods

How does this play out in the real world? The truth is they are all interconnected, it just depends on which point you are emphasizing. Understanding how we use training variables for these goals is very important.

We can see these ideas in practical ways. In squatting patterns we can introduce or help “groove” the pattern by using a kettlebell goblet squat. We can add more stress to the movement by loading a front squat. Finally we can introduce instabilitywith a shoulder sandbag squat (try to minimally use a load 50% of your front squat weight).

With even more complex drills like thrusters, we have a lot of options. Just by using kettlebells instead of dumbbells or dumbbells instead of kettlebells (use the opposite of what you have been) you are going to feel a great new level of instability.

We can move in a more unstable manner by going from a drop lunge up to an overhead press. This adds instability via different body position. Finally, we can add instability through a new plane of motion and unstable implement with a lateral lunge to rotational sandbag press.

Should You Change?

Doing something different from the crowd may be a little intimidating, but fitness changes, and changes fast. Using the methods I am describing will open up a door to more than just novel exercises.

This approach to training will allow you to progress in more ways in your workouts and allow you to scale the workouts for your clients through more than load or volume. Try these exercises out and see how your training can skyrocket.

References:

1. McGill, Stuart, Ultimate Back Fitness and Performance. Waterloo, Canada: Backfitpro Incorporated, 2006.

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Good training is about managing variables that make up a great fitness program. Not some of the variables, not just the ones you think are cool, but all of them. And it is completely possible you might be unaware of all of the variables.

Managing training variables means being aware, understanding how changing them can greatly or subtly change the intensity of a training program, and how they all relate to one another to create successful training plans. Of course it is out of the scope of a singular article to write about all of these variables, but there is one that I ignored for quite some time, and when I addressed it, it opened up not only new and purposeful exercises, but greatly changed how I organized training.

That variable was the idea of changing stability. It wasn’t that I was unaware of instability training, but had seen it in so many forms I never really appreciated how examining changing stability could completely change my programs, progressions, and planning.

So, what is stability training and how can you incorporate it into some supercharged training drills?

For a long time we focused on stability as it referred to a specific joint or region. Ideas such as shoulder stability, core stability, hip stability, and more all have been a point of emphasis in physical therapy circles for a long time. In the 1990s these ideas started to also become more prevalent in the world of fitness and performance training. These early ideas were part of the “functional training” movement that realized athletes and every day people couldn’t simply follow the models of bodybuilding, Olympic lifting, and powerlifting due to the far more diverse needs in every day and sporting activities.

One of the fathers of functional training, Vern Gambetta, summed up in an article why functional training was a necessary evolution in training and fitness:

“For me the concepts came together and solidified in the late 1980s. I was alarmed at the biased one-sided training regimens that I saw being imposed on athletes. We were trapped in a reductionist, mechanistic approach that segmented the body into parts and separate systems. We were creating robotic athletes that were good in a sterile training environment but had difficulty transferring training to the sport. It was also clear to that if you are doing too much of one thing then you are probably not doing much of something else, it was a zero sum relationship. The result was an athlete fully adapted to that one component of training.”

While some may believe functional training to be a goofy terminology that results in wacky and often circus-type exercises, they are somewhat correct. This was never the intent of functional training, as Coach Gambetta explained:

“Unfortunately the concept of functional training as it has evolved and been co-opted by the ‘fitness industry’ has been bastardized and compromised into a weird amalgamation of crazy exercises without any logical progression or justification. It is more than exercises; it is a systematic sequential and progressive approach to training for the rigors of competition…. It is more than just a bunch of exercises thrown together that are different; it is variety with a purpose. The key to a good sound functional training program is progression. You must carefully assess where you are at the present time and carve out a step-by-step progression to achieve specific realistic training objectives. Know where have you been and where are you going.”

This is a big reason I wanted to revisit the world of stability training. Often when we think of functional training we think of funny-looking exercises being performed on a host of unstable objects. The idea was that we would turn on more stabilizers by doing so, but recent research has shown us that this type of training really doesn’t work. A study by Willardson et al looked at the back squat, deadlift, overhead press, and curl, and concluded that “fitness trainers should be advised that each of the aforementioned lifts can be performed while standing on stable ground without losing the potential core muscle training benefits.”

The idea of adding instability may not be wrong, though. We may have just used the wrong methods. Unfortunately most coaches do not distinguish between whole body and segmental stability. In his book on back fitness, leading spine researcher, Dr. Stuart McGill, pointed out some significant differences:

“Whole body stability is quite different from spine stability. It involves positioning the center of mass within the base of support in a static context which would include the situation of falling over when standing. Dynamic whole body stability considers the intertial forces such as when riding a bike.”

If that seems a bit confusing don’t worry, it can be a bit much to digest. Dr. McGill is suggesting that challenging our ability to integrate the muscles of the body to cause a synergistic contraction of muscles throughout the body is key in developing stability. Since our body is a bunch of connected chains, this type of training is far more useful and practical. Dr. McGill also points out that which muscles act as stabilizers can often be dependent upon the activity being performed, even those of the trunk.

Where does that leave us for training? One of the easiest ways to achieve the goals of functional training that Coach Gambetta discusses and the concepts that Dr. McGill teaches is to use different body positions to challenges all these aspects. While training in different body positions is not necessarily a new idea, doing so in a progressive manner may be. Most coaches simply go either stable or unstable without much consideration to changes in intensity to the lifter. In our DVRT system we look at stability and creating instability as a progressive element, just like load, speed, volume, and other training variables.

One of our favorite drills to incorporate these concepts is what we call “staggered stance.” The beauty of the staggered stance position is that it still allows progressive loading and doesn’t jump from a very stable position (i.e. squat) to something very unstable (such as lunges or pistols). We wouldn’t aim to jump up hundreds of pounds in weight, but we often do this very thing when it comes to incorporating instability.

By using the staggered stance we can slightly modify a number of exercises and learn how to integrate the entire body more effectively. If we don’t learn how to activate these kinetic chains we begin to see a very subtle level of instability – lateral sway in exercises like deadlifts, rotation in squatting patterns, and too much low back extension in overhead pressing. Staggered stance is such a simple means of introducing instability but can be a powerful bridge to more complex and meaningful progressions of instability.

While most coaches feel that instability training is cheesy, ineffective, and for weak people who don’t like to train hard, if you take the principles and concepts of true functional training and instability training you will be able to reap great rewards. In part two of my articles on instability, I will demonstrate some other simple and highly effective means in using instability to elevate your results.

References:

1. “Functional Training – Method or Madness? Part Two“

2. JM Willardson et al., “Effect of surface stability on core muscle activity for dynamic resistance exercises,” Int J Sports Physiol Perform, 2009 Mar;4(1):97-109.

3. McGill, Stuart. Ultimate Back Fitness and Performance. Stuart McGill, PhD; 3 edition (April 2004)

The post The Best Squat, Deadlift, Press, and Other Drills You Miss appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Bear in mind there are some good reasons to do unstable surface training that are less extreme than the example above. It has been theorized that working on an unstable surface may decrease the load needed to activate the muscles and so it might be good for rehabilitation. Similarly, it is believed that this type of training may work some of your muscles more than stable surface training. However, a study this month in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning challenges that hypothesis.

In case you’re not familiar with the terms, unstable surface training is exactly what it sounds like. It’s when you perform resistance or bodyweight training with all or part of you acting against a surface that itself can move. Stable surface training, on the other hand, is when you are simply standing on the ground, sitting on a regular bench, and so forth.

In the study, the researchers compared a standard back squat on the ground to the same movement on a Reebok Core Board, examining the level of muscular activity for each. And no, for once these researchers were not paid to find a benefit.

Interestingly, the Core Board is one of the more stable of available unstable surfaces. This seems like a good thing to me, as unstable surface training tends to reduce the load lifted substantially, and while it might activate your muscles better pound-for-pound, you just plain can’t lift as much. When you’re trying to develop strength that’s a pretty damning effect on your progress. Indeed, in this study participants lifted up to 60% of their stable surface squat maximum.

For the first result of the study – drum roll, please – the researchers determined that the more weight that was lifted, the greater the activity of the muscles. This was true irrespective of the surface. They then discovered that the surface itself did not alter muscle activation. That’s right, the unstable surface did not perform better than the stable one. And presumably the maximum lift for the stable surface was higher, but hard to say because they researchers didn’t test this. If you’re wondering why they didn’t test if the maximum the subjects could lift was comparable on the unstable surface, the reason is probably because it’s not safe to do so. To me, that alone should tell you something.

Since training load was the substantial factor in muscle activation, the researchers suggested ditching unstable surface training, although acknowledging they didn’t test the deeper musculature, which may have had a different result. To this end, researchers noted rightly that few sports are performed on an unstable surface so it’s probably a bad idea to waste your time with it.

References:

1. Yongming Li, et. al., “Similar Electromyographic Activities of Lower Limbs Between Squatting on a Reebok Core Board and Ground,” Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research, 27(5), 2013

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