5 Proven Methods To Strengthen Your Muscle Stabilizers
Muscle stabilizers are important when you’re training with heavy weights, as it stabilizes and keep your body steady while you’re moving up and down. Despite its importance, most gym-goers often ignored it because they don’t give the striated appearance like muscles do. As a result, they struggled when they have to lift heavy objects outside of the gym.
So what can you do to strengthen your muscle stabilizers?
1. Free Weights
Your stabilizing muscles have to contract to keep your body steady throughout the whole movement. If you choose to use machines only, they will take stabilizers out of the motion while focusing solely on the muscle.
The best type of exercise that helps strengthen the stabilizer muscles are compound movements such as squats, deadlifts, bench press, and overhead press, because they recruit a number of muscles with only one movement.
2. Single Hand/Leg Exercises
Using only one limb to exercise will force your body to stabilize yourself, otherwise the weight will lean towards one side and you’ll fall down. The added benefit of doing so is to correct any muscular imbalance, since your dominant limbs tend to be stronger than the counterpart.
3. Exercising On Unstable Surface
Performing exercises such as bodyweight squat on a BOSU ball, or dumbbell press on a stability ball will force the stabilizers to work.
4. Functional Training
As the name implies, this is a method used to train your body to perform its function properly in everyday’s life. The basic movements that you’ll be utilizing are bend and lifts, torso rotation, single leg squat, push, and press movement.
5. Plyometric Exercises
If you’re not exercising in a gym, but you still want to train your muscle stabilizers, you can incorporate plyometric exercises into your routine such as tuck jumps, side to side, and sprinting on an elevated level.
Don’t let these exercises fool you into thinking it’s easy. Just because you can bench 300 pounds doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to handle these exercises with ease. The main point here is that muscular strength doesn’t mean anything when it comes to stability training.
It’s extremely important that athletes are training their stabilizers so that it can improve their strength, coordination, and performance, while reducing their chances of getting injured while they’re on the pitch.
Remember, you’re only as strong as your weakest link.
