Stability in Motion
What do you think of when you think of stability? Maybe something strong, not moving, able to withstand resistance? You’re on the right track, but it’s not exactly accurate. The way the fitness world (including me!) uses the term “stability” is a bit confusing. We like to think of stability as being still. But actually, stability is the ability to recover from a perturbation. Think of walking down the side walk. You trip on some uneven pavement. How quickly are you able to return to your center of gravity and keep going? Do you injure yourself? Do you fall? Do you tweak your knee? How long did the whole tripping scenario take? 1 second? A quarter of a second? 3 seconds? How quickly and smoothly you’re able to return to center is your measure of stability. Not, how still can you hold yourself in a split stance position that resembles walking. What’s really cool about this distinction is that thinking about stability as recovering from perturbation is way more useful and applicable to how we live. We’re rarely holding completely still during our day. We’re moving something. So, while I love to teach balancing poses, I teach them less often in still form, and more in terms of transitioning from one pose to the next—your ability to retain your center of gravity through movement is far more interesting to me than if you can hold tree pose perfectly still for 2 minutes.
This is not to say that holding poses still is not useful. It creates a lot of strength and awareness. Imagine standing in a high lunge position (if you’re not sure what that looks like, check out this photo here). Now imagine being in that high lunge with a block under your front foot. You’re likely experiencing more effort, more sensation in your hamstring, outer hip, and/or inner thigh. You have a stronger connection with your foot from the feedback of the block. You may feel more grounding in your back leg because of different weight distribution. Holding this pose can do wonders to feeling the inner workings of a lunge, AND can make your lunge muscles stronger. This strength and awareness will absolutely contribute to your stability—your ability to come back from a perturbation when in a lunge. But holding still in this pose doesn’t by itself mean you’re increasing your stability.
Alongside strength and awareness, mobility is also key in better stability. Imagine a stone sculpture about 5 feet tall and 1 foot wide (a small person). Imagine if you accidentally bumped into this small sculpture—because it’s made of stone, it’s going to move all in once piece wherever it’s going. Likely, if you bumped into it, it will fall to the ground. Now imagine an actual human about that same size. If you bumped into it—likely an hourly occurrence on NYC sidewalks—does the other person fall to the ground every time? I hope not! We don’t fall like that, usually, because all of our amazing joints that are there to help create movement within our structure so that we can return to our center. How well we do that and in how many various situations we can do it dictates our level of stability. So, contrary to what you may be thinking, you want to have a lot of movement—controlled movement—between your joints and a lot of differentiation (think teamwork, where everyone plays a part) between your muscles to create more stability. Imagine wearing an oven mitt on each of your hands all day. How much would you really be able to do with your hands? Not a whole lot. It would require a TON of more energy from the rest of your body to help your hands do what they can’t because of the mitts. It’s a super inefficient way to move. Apply that now to your spine. What if your spine moved in a block like fashion, all in one piece? What about your feet?
We’ve been on a hip kick in class for several weeks now. Now that we’re beginning to understand the mobility capacity of the hips, we’ll test out our stability with some perturbations! Check out the latest Control Yourself video here to get an idea of what I mean.
keep moving.
xoxo