Strength and stability training is of the utmost importance for everyone. A well designed strength program can tone and shape the body, create muscular and postural balance, as well as have carry over effects into your activities of daily living where you feel the difference.
One of the most important keys for achieving those kinds of results is that the program be designed to suit your body type, goals, physical background, current limitations and abilities, skill level, etc. There are a number of things to consider. The exercises demonstrated on this page and some of the other pages are but a small sampling from a very large pool of possibilities. There are literally many hundreds of exercises that can done to strengthen and build stability and lean muscle. Some of the exercises on this page are rather advanced like the Stability Ball Push Up, Medicine Ball Push Up, Stability Ball Bicycle Maneuver, Prone Jack Knife and Two-Legged Prone Hip Extension demonstrated in the photo above. But then there are those perfectly suited for many beginners such as the Dumbbell Press, Seated Cable Row, Squat Push Press, Leg Curl, and Abdominal Roll.
You’ll notice that many of the exercises on this page employ a Stability Ball in combination with free weights, cables, medicine balls and body weight. The Stability Ball is one of the greatest training tools, because of the very simple fact that it is an unstable environment, as is much of the world. It provides a far more functional training environment than a bench and certainly much more than a guided resistance machine. You simply develop more strength in a functional training environment than you do in a very stable and impractical training environment like the ones we see plaguing many gyms. The fancy machines that are commonplace in the fitness club industry have very little benefit. They train the superficial prime mover muscles of the body, which is what advertisers use to make them popular, but they do very little or nothing for the important stabilizer and neutralizer muscles of the body, which protect joints and allow you to move better in the world. This is a real problem in today’s fitness environment, because training on these machines can obviously increase a person’s risk for injury in the real world (outside the gym) for the simple reason that the world does not occur in this hyper-stable manner. That kind of impractical training environment will not cause recruitment of your important stabilizer muscles and it also doesn’t do anything more for your superficial prime movers than a functional training program would. In the end you are being sold equipment that is essentially useless.
On the other hand, amazing results are achieved by training the “core” stabilizers (trunk abdominal musculature) while training the limbs of the body. Your core contains your center of gravity and as you move the core must stabilize your center so that all of your movements are as controlled as possible. As I was taught while studying to become a Medical Exercise Specialist, “Proximal stability gives us distal mobility”. That is to say, a strong core makes movement of your arms and legs much easier. It also protects the spine by attenuating forces away from it, as well as train the abs for that nice 6 pack. ALL human movement emanates from the core outward. Therefore, training programs should also go from the core outward. If a bunch of electrodes to measure the electrical activity of muscles were placed throughout your body and you were asked to shoot out your left arm, the very first muscles that would fire would actually be your core muscles. You would then have some inner thigh muscles in your right leg fire for balance purposes and finally the actual muscles in your left shoulder and arm that shoot out that arm. In short, ALL human movement is centrally generated.
Training the different segments of the body to work synergistically gives you more of an experience of being both mentally and physically “Engaged”; hence Engaged Fitness. The brain knows nothing of muscles. It only knows movements and so it sends neurological messages to activate numerous muscles in order to perform a certain movement(s). In short, this is what we are designed for. We are not designed to work out on guided resistance machines that do not really engage us. Machine training basically puts the nervous system to sleep. When we are truly engaged by an exercise program, the results will follow. Functional training burns more calories, develops more strength and lean muscle, builds greater core stability and balance, has greater carry over into your activities of daily living, reduces your risk of injury, and has greater nervous system activation, thus generating more neural drive and energy. As I stated in the “Training Room” page, we are training the body in the manner in which it was designed to move. All of this amounts to you looking better, feeling better and most certainly moving better. This is not a system or style of training. This is training! PERIOD!
Safety Tip for exercises involving a Stability Ball: If the floor is slippery, then a mat should be used in order to ensure that the ball does not roll out from under you.