Research Updates

Stability Flop

Now even the scientific community is

starting to mount evidence to prove

what I’ve said about stability training...

Stability Flop

Now even the scientific community is starting to mount evidence to prove what I’ve said about stability training...

By Luke Lowrey

The controversy over stability training (also known as proprioceptive training, whole-body vibration (WBV) training and fixator training) as a viable means to increase performance as been discussed back and forth for some years now, with many trainers and athletes theorizing that by engaging more muscle fibers through atypical training methods, performance would also increase.

The essence of the argument is that if such training “produces neuromuscular improvement similar to that of power and strength training”1, then it will also produce “neurogenic enhancement for power, speed, and agility.”1

Whilst stability training is not exactly the same as WBV training, the tenets are the same: added stimulation to an unstable environment.

The Sport Coaching and Management Program in New Zealand recently studied this hypothesis, randomly assigning 24 non-athletic sport science students to 2 groups of non-athletes: 1) WBV Training or 2) Control, with each group containing 8 men and 4 women. The researchers measured Countermovement Jump (CMJ) height, squat jump (SJ) height, sprint speed over 5, 10 and 20 meters, and agility, before and after 9 days of 1) WBV training or 2) no training (control).1

The researchers observed, and concluded, that in non-athletes WBV training did not enhancement performance in the three critical measures of vertical jump, speed and agility.

The long and short of it is this, as I’ve always said: increasing your stability will increase your stability, increasing your vertical leap will increase your vertical leap.

Pretty simple.

The fact that non-athletes were tested is important for two reasons: 1) Non-athletes will be neuromuscularly inferior to athletes, in terms of both their condition and their ability and 2) Non-athletes arguably should show greater results sooner, given the fact that they lack any previous training stimulation whatsoever. This lends further evidence that WBV training, in and of itself, is exceptionally poor at increasing vertical jump height and sprint speed.

:: Luke’s Wrap ::

This is not to say that WBV training and other relative training modes, like stability and fixator training are useless and of no value to the athlete. On the contrary, these training modes are often important, especially to less co-ordinated and inexperienced athletes.

I also believe that stability training is a great complimentary training mode, so long as it is coupled with the other, more foundational modes, that specify a focus on raw power development as their stated goal and by their definition.

However, on this occasion, you cannot argue with the numbers -- WBV training has been shown to be ineffective at increasing vertical jump height, sprint speed and agility.

Reference:

1 Cochrane DJ, Legg SJ, Hooker MJ.

The short-term effect of whole-body vibration training on vertical jump, sprint, and agility performance.
J Strength Cond Res. 2004 Nov;18(4):828-32.

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