Dr Brandon Marcello - Stability

Brandon Marcello debunks some of the myths on stability.

Transcript:

Essentially, what I’m trying to say is, this is the largest and biggest error that I see: people attempting to train stabilizers in an unstable environment. That’s just not what it is, and it’s as simple as a test and a retest. Stabilization is a sequence of events. It is the activation and the inhibition of specific muscles at specific periods of time to allow certain movements and inhibit other movements. Standing on an unbalanced surface; standing on a bosu ball; standing on a physio ball or sitting on a physio ball does not engage stabilizers in a specific way, because it’s all about timing.

As a mentioned, it should be as simple as a test and retest: if I squat on a bosu ball and then I squat not on a bosu ball, I should become more stable, I should be able to measure my stabilizers and test my stabilizers and see that, and that’s just not the case, we don’t see that. When you do a test/retest, it doesn’t happen.

I’m not saying that balance is not influenced by stability, it most certainly is, but there are a lot of things that influence it. Stability and motor control is an influencer of your balance center, so is eye sight, so is proprioception, so is balance and so is your vestibular system. So, there are a lot of things that contribute to balance center, but I don’t want to confuse balance with stability. Balance is being able to maintain an upright center of mass and to achieve a balance left and right, forward and back, and to stay upright or erect. That’s not stability, that’s balance.