Exercise Ball exercises challenge proprioception. Here's how...

Exercise ball exercises introduce a variable of instability.

Essentially, the ball provides an unstable environment causing additional muscles to work as your body is forced to maintain balance.

Generally, these additional muscles are ‘stabilization’ muscles.

Stabilizer muscles steady or support the body while the primary muscle or 'prime mover' conducts the movement pattern.

These muscles are typically not recruited when working out on fixed exercise equipment, which helps explain why trained individuals are also sometimes surprised by the challenge of stability ball workouts- even though they are accustomed to using heavier loads.

Despite some of the postulated benefits, exercise ball exercises are not necessarily appreciated by everyone, perhaps even more so by those who like to move a lot of weight.

It’s true you won’t be able to lift heavy on a ball- nor are you intended to.

But just like any other exercise or piece of equipment such as barbells, weight machines, cables, dumbbells, etc., it’s just one more tool at your disposal to solicit a specific training response.

Indeed, stabilizer muscles are more effectively stimulated when training in unstable environments.

Consider exercise ball exercises as proprioceptive exercises.

Here’s a simplistic explanation of how that works…

Your body has many ‘sensory’ capabilities. Your joints, your tendons, and your muscles have different types of ‘receptors’ that react when they sense a change in body position, limb movement, and sensation.

This 'sensory information' from our internal and external environments are transmitted to the nervous system, the central command centre- for interpretation, processing, and ultimately, for a response.

Your nervous system consists of billions of cells that form nerves serving as an intricate communication network for your body.

All human movement is dictated by your nervous system. This in part, is why you often hear how important it is to train the nervous system.

Receptors throughout your body that collectively feed this sensory information to your nervous system is called 'proprioception'. It describes your sensory capabilities.

Good sensory capabilities are also a reflection of proper muscle recruitment and firing rate.

Your nervous system has to send the signal to fire the muscles in the correct order, at the proper time and with just the right amount of force needed.

There is some research to show that whenever joint or ligament injuries occur, sensory input from the receptors to the nervous system is altered, and proprioception is perturbed.

Consequently, affected muscles may become slow to activate causing neighbouring muscles to act in substitution or to be overly active in comparison to the norm.

Whenever the wrong muscles are forced to compensate, you have a faulty movement pattern.

Addressing some of these deficiencies is precisely why physical therapists love the ball so much.

Training in a proprioceptively enriched environment develops optimal sensory input to the nervous system and facilitates what some sources call ‘synchronicity’ of muscle-firing patterns.

Thus, a physio ball helps you train balance and coordination.

It challenges your low-back and abdominal stabilizers as you learn to activate your body’s proprioceptive mechanisms.

Performing exercise ball exercises can appear easy from afar, however they require high levels of balance.

Therefore, care should be taken if you are an older adult or if you do not have good balance.

Use common sense and take your skills and abilities into consideration before performing stability ball exercises. Be sure you understand proper form and technique.

Many folks are curious as to what kind of exercises can be performed on a stability ball.

To get an idea, visit the Exercise Library to see a few swiss ball exercise illustrations:

Stability Ball Exercises

The concept is to simply use the swiss ball as a chair. Find out more in our next topic...

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