Just the other day I was training one of my jiu-jitsu guys and we saw a trainer having his client stand on a bosu ball while performing a dumbbell lateral raise with one hand and an over head dumbbell press with the other hand. This is ridiculous. The first problem is your forced to stand bow legged. This puts a lot of stress on the ligaments of the knee and ankle. If you stand on one foot this wouldn’t happen but you still have the second problem, reducing the load because you’re unstable, therefore recruiting fewer motor units and not properly loading the prime movers of the lift. If you did the same exercise on the ground you would recruit more motor units and thus get stronger because you don’t have to perform this balancing act. But even if you’re on the ground still don’t do the exercise mentioned above, it still sucks. Hopefully you already know that.
As far as training the abdominals or “the core”, which I’m so tired of hearing it called.There are a some good exercises that you can do but recent research has shown that direct “core” training only works for about six weeks anyways. You’ll actually build stronger and better abs from squatting and dead lifting over any direct abdominal exercise because you have to stabilize the spine through abdominal bracing.
Some people think you will develop better coordination and reaction time..... Wrong. You will get better at the specific lift, however, it won't transfer into better coordination in other places. The fact is coordination is 90% established by the age of 12.
I believe most trainers have poor resources for information. They find these so-called expert trainers doing all these unstable exercises on these devices, call it "functional training", and claim it to be cutting edge. The one’s making these outrageous claims simply do not know how to get someone strong. What’s trendy often gets confused for cutting edge and that’s hardly ever the case.
Chris Grayson
graysontrainingsystems.com
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