Lifting while standing on the balance ball?

[Omfgorzzz]

Originally Posted by Dr Clay

Exercising while standing on a ball or a half ball is great if you are preparing to audition for Cirque du Soleil.

Okay sure, if you are rehabbing an ankle, knee, hip, or pelvic injury or muscular imbalance, then exercising on an unstable surface is often a great option.

Here are my (brief) thoughts on some of the claims or points made about training on unstable surface (i.e. Bosu ball):

1) it's functional training -- functional for what? Baseball, soccer, football, hockey, lacrosse, badminton, tennis, table tennis, and so on... all of these sports are played on a level surface, not only a semicircular ball!

2) CNS activation -- moving heavier weight and moving it more quickly is THE fundamental way to increase CNS activation with weight training. Standing on an unstable surface causes more activation in stabilizing muscles like the peroneus brevis, glute medius, etc. But that does not mean that it increases motor unit recruitment of the primary muscle being worked! Again, that's where more resistance (a.k.a. tension) and a faster rep speed come into play.

3) you burn more calories -- guess what... you can also burn more calories by utilizing more weight, and this will have a MUCH more profound effect on the target muscle.

Let me clarify that I am not at all against training on a Bosu ball or any other unstable surface. But I am against doing it just because it's cool or unique, when the client/trainee would actually get much better results by training on the ground... which is about 99.5% of the time.

Okay, I'm done with my rant :-)

Best,

This, this, and this.