The Value of Instability in Exercise

Our muscles’ constant fight against instability strengthens and keeps our stabilizer muscles strong, enhancing our stability and balance!

The value of stability was put heavily on my mind after a friend of mine told me that her mother-in-law fell off the toilet because she could not hold herself up properly. My friend had been trying to get her to do things to increase her strength, but she simply didn’t want to do anything for the prior year except the minimal daily functions. She would set on sofa/chair and when she got up, she would be holding onto the walker, (her muscles atrophied accordingly as well as her capability to stabilize).

When we are constantly supported by something, while sitting, standing, walking and even exercise, our stabilizer muscles become weaker. This is a huge benefit that free weight and bodyweight exercises provide, due to our body having to stabilize the movement vs. a machine doing it for us. There are lots of little stabilizer muscles that engage to hold us steady and help pull us back into balance whenever we get off balance. When these muscles are not used regularly whether through exercise or through our daily activities, they simply become weaker and weaker.

Free weight and bodyweight exercise vs. machines: a benefit of free weight exercises and bodyweight exercises is they exercise muscle groups like we use them in daily life. When we are lifting, pulling, or pressing something in our daily routine and even if we’re just standing still unsupported by anything, our body is constantly trying to balance itself or the object that force is being put into. Machines on the other hand target the primary muscle groups but leave out many stabilizer muscles because the machine is doing the stabilization work for us. Another example of something that works stabilizer muscle and one that doesn’t is a bicycle vs. a tricycle.

You can test how strong your stabilizer muscles in your legs are by trying 3 simple moves.

1. Spread your feet, lean forward, backwards, then side to side.

2. Next try to do the same thing with your feet tight together, keep something close that you can grab hold of if you lose your balance.

3. Next hold on to something if you need to but try to see how long you can stand on one foot.

There are so many things in life that try to throw us off balance, that by simply living a very active lifestyle our balance improves due to the constant use of our stabilizer muscles against the destabilization forces coming from all angles when we’re not stabilizing ourselves on or with something. So we’re exercising our stabilizer muscles simply by being active! When we get inactive, our muscles, tendons, ligaments, and bones get weaker, but the capability to steady ourselves becomes weaker as well.

Question: why is it when we are grocery shopping that it is so much more restful to be the one pushing the cart? We can get so much more exercise when we do it with a basket or at the least not put weight onto the handle and walk off from it whenever we can to gather our items. We can get a decent exercise routine by taking a brisk walk from the far end of the parking lot and extending it into the store.

Example stability exercise: do a free-standing squat and as you come up thrust your arms upward toward the ceiling, you can use dumbbells in this movement as well. You can decrease your stability and force more stabilizer muscles to work by simply putting your feet together and doing the same movement, repeat movement as many times as you can for several sets after an initial warm up set.

Sometime while standing, move your feet tightly together and just stand there and feel all the little muscles twitching from your toes to your torso that are working to balance you and keep you from falling.

The gift of balance is one that goes away when left unchallenged…

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