Some time ago, I took a strong dose of a muscle relaxer for acute lower back pain. It worked so well that the only muscles that were firing were the ones that allowed me to crawl into bed to sleep for almost 36 hours. When standing, I could have been pushed over by a feather, that’s how relaxed I was. Probably the first muscles to “relax” were the stabilizers that kept me upright, in defiance of gravity.

When you do a push-up, what prevents your back from sagging and your belly hitting the floor? If you said “nothing”, besides making a wrong mouse click to this post unintentionally, I would say your spinal erectors are weak. When you are holding a plank position doing a push-up, the spinal erectors go into an isometric contraction to keep you tight, allowing your primary muscles to do the movement.

So, the stabilizing muscles keep your body tight, balanced and in recruitment with other muscles to carry out a physical movement, say, like walking, which we all would consider functional movement. In fact, you can’t have good functional movement without strong stabilizers. Contracted stabilizers keep your body under tension, which is a good thing because it also prevents injury. Heavy deadlifting is where I first learned the importance of keeping this tension in the body. Consider it as a necessary safety mechanism.

In the gym with all the elaborate pieces of equipment available to do isolation exercises like bicep curls and other “mirror muscle” exercises, the emphasis is on the strict targeting of a major muscle group and not necessarily recruiting any others, hence the name, isolation. In compound exercises, many major muscles are called upon and the stabilizers are there to assist. The body is an engineering structural marvel when you consider the sophistication of human movement!

Try this: do 5 reps of 45# dumbbell concentration curls and really focus on isolating the bicep. Now take a 6′ 45# barbell and do the same thing, with one arm. It is a lot harder, isn’t it? Try it again, but this time, get every muscle in your body tight and rigid, keep your elbow in close to the body and grip the bar like you are going to crush it.

What you are doing is recruiting more major and stabilizing muscles to help you perform the task. Pavel calls this the Principle of Irradiation. If you were to tense and recruit muscles like this on all your exercises, not only would your primary muscles increase in strength but so would your entire body.

If you machine train, this alone will help you get more reps and more weight, but the real beauty of strengthening the stabilizers, is in compound lifting like Olympic and power lifting, dumbbells and kettlebells, where strong stabilizers are a necessity. The next level up where these muscles are crucial is when you are lifting heavy, odd-shaped things like sandbags, partially-filled barrels of water and slosh pipes.

From a daily use application, imagine how you felt the two days after the dreaded Moving Day, emptying a houseful of stuff into a moving van, unloading it into the new house and then organizing it. (The mere thought of this makes me cringe)! In spite of your machine or barbell strength, you will be sore as hell, first from muscles you don’t train much and then muscles you painfully exclaim, “I never even knew I had these”! Those are your neglected stabilizer muscles.

How do you train them? I suppose you could become a professional mover, but for most of us, it is about as appealing as lumberjack logrolling or being on a chain gang next to Bubba, (sledgehammer and pick ax training).

You aren’t going to get much stabilization muscle strength from machines since the machine makes it all stable for you, keeping you only on a single physical plane of movement. Hell, on most of these, you get to sit or lie down! That Hammer Curl machine is good for only one thing, nothing, I mean curls.

Barbell training with power and Olympic-style lifting will definitely help you improve your overall strength, but movements such as bodyweight exercises, including pull-ups, ballistic exercises, especially kettlebell swings and snatches are good examples, sandbags, lifting heavy, odd-shaped things like stones and kegs is where the real strength lies. If you have ever worked on a farm, you know what I am talking about. In fact, that strong farm kid who often excels in sports, would laugh his butt off watching us swinging kettlebells and tossing sandbags. Some of us would barely last a day in his world!

Though I don’t use them much, I think Bosu balancers have some value, as it puts you on an unstable plane while you are doing an exercise. It requires a lot of stability muscle action and will develop coordination and balance which are necessary complements to strength.

For me, stability training is something that works well outside of the gym, in the real world, developing real strength.

I would love to hear your comments and thoughts on this post.

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