you may have heard Dumbbell exercises are better than barbell exercises because they work more of your body. “stabilizers,” or that free weights are better than machines for Same reason. But what are stabilizer muscles? AAre they really careless with machine exercises and are they so important for training?
What are stabilizer muscles?
This is going to get fuzzy, because there’s really no agreement on which stabilizer muscles even are. This 2014 study searched the literature for mentions of stabilizer muscles and tried to put together a definition. This is what they came up with:
muscles that contribute to joint stiffness by co-contraction and show an early onset of activation in response to perturbation through a feed-forward or feedback control mechanism.
Good, stabilizer muscles they are muscles that, well, stabilize. What muscles are those? That is a more difficult question. You can find a lot of research on “low back [lower back] stabilizers” or “trunk [core] stabilizers” or “knee stabilizers”. But these don’t turn out to be specific muscles that only stabilize joints. For example, This studio in knee stabilizers name four muscles that are part of the quadriceps and hamstring muscle groups (the large muscle groups in the front and back of the thigh, respectively). Are those stabilizers, or are are they simply muscles that move the legs?
The stabilizers of one exercise can be the prime movers of another
That’s why I don’t worry too much about machines that neglect the “stabilizer” muscles. If you do a variety of quad exercises and a variety of hamstring exercises, you’re guaranteed to work the quad and hamstring muscles that act as knee stabilizers when you run and jump.
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Or to use another example: single leg exercises like step-Step-ups and lunges are great for working your abductors (hip muscles) and adductors (inner thigh muscles) because those muscles work to keep your leg steady as you swing. put weight on him. But if a person has never done single-leg exercises, he could still work those muscles by doing exercises that target them as prime movers, like the adductor and abductor machines.
Being stable is about coordination, not just strength.
If we look back at the research on knee stabilizers, scientists have a theory that it’s good to use those stabilizer muscles when running and jumping. It’s not just about the strength of those muscles, but also about your ability to activate them when needed.
So the way you keep your knees stable is not just doing free weight exercises, although they are great, but also running, jumping, twisting, and cutting exercises. (Think soccer players running around cones and rope ladders.)
In other words, practice it’s important for joint stability, not just strength. If you want to remain firm and stable while performing certain movements, you will need to train your brain to push those muscles at the right time and in the right order.
Strength and stability are sometimes at odds
So what should you do in the gym? You may notice that strong people usually use a combination of exercises. They can squat and bench with a barbell, but end their sessions with a dumbbell bench press or leg extensions There is a continuum to exercise, strong at one end and stability in the other, and each of thoIt exercises falls at a different point on that continuum.
Let’s use the bench press as an example. On a barbell bench press you need to use your legs to stabilize your torso, your torso to make a stable platform for your arms, and your arms to move the weight. Even though you’re training your pecs and triceps as the main movers, you’re engaging a lot of your shoulder, core, back, and leg muscles as stabilizers.
We can engage our stabilizers more if we did something like a dumbbell bench press with our backs on a yoga ball. We’d have to work harder to keep everything stable, but as a result, we wouldn’t be able to use as much weight. We would be training the stabilizers more but the main engines less.
We would get the opposite on a chest press machine. There, you don’t have to stabilize much at all, just as much as it takes to sit in the chair without falling over. The pecs and triceps are no longer limited by what our stabilizers can handle, so we can “lift” even more weight. (That, of course, comes with the caveat that machine labels cannot be compared to barbell or dumbbell weights; the mechanics are different.)
So do you needtrain” your stabilizers?
my take is this: meIf you train every part of your body, no matter how you do it, Will you end up training all of your stabilizer muscles. Yes, even if you do a full machine routine. the routine alone has to be ok-rounded.
If you’ve stuck to “functional” exercises that require a lot of stabilization, you’re probably doing much for your stabilizers without really thinking about it. The trade-off is that you may not be giving the main engines of each exercise as much work.
You can easily get the best of both worlds by doing a variety of exercises. If you never do anything that makes you feel unstable, add some single leg exercises, leads, or other slightly unstable work into your routine. (No need to stand on a bosuthough you can if you want, I suppose.) And if you do a lot of stability work, test some machines either barbell exercises from time to time to make sure you’re also building strength.
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