What are Stabilizer Muscles?

		Stabilizer muscles are the muscles that stabilize one joint so a desired movement can be performed in another joint. Stabilizer Muscles help keep the bones and joints in a secure position while the Prime Movers extend and flex the body area being trained. The stabilizer muscles help align and maintain joint integrity consistently through the normal range of motion as well as providing balance.

The Importance of Stabilizer Muscles and Athletic Performance - Part 1

		The concept of muscle balance, unfortunately, is the most underemphasized aspect of many fitness programs everywhere. What is muscle balance really? How do you test it? What does it have to do with stability and performance? First of all, we must understand that all joints in the body must be aligned properly to be able to absorb shock, allowing forces to dissipate into the ground, and decrease wear and tear on the body. Muscles surrounding the joint must have optimal amounts of tension in all directions to hold the joint in its place. If the muscles are not balanced, the joint position is altered and the arthrokinematics of the joint are also altered. If the joint is not moving properly due to poor muscle balance, then assisting muscles (synergists) must do extra work to help stabilize the joint. Many athletes underestimate the importance of stability, yet this is a crucial component of performance. When you're unstable, your body will put it's energy into the stabilizer muscles to get you back in balance and to protect your joints from injury. This is a protective mechanism built into your body's design and it is completely involuntary. Its also practically unnoticeable until the athlete is exhausted from exerting so much energy to balance themselves. The stabilizer muscles have a survival priority over voluntary muscles ("prime movers"). When most of your energy is used trying to stay in balance, there is very little left for voluntary movement. Remember that day when you first got the nerve to take your hands off the bars and were delighted to find out you could actually ride your bike around the block that way? Or that afternoon on the river when you were introduced to kayaking and felt like you'd been born in a shell? Experiences like these have a crucial, yet often overlooked, common thread: balance. The lingua franca of every sport - the ability to right yourself in dynamic situations - is what allows great athletes to quickly master new competitive activities.

The Importance of Stabilizer Muscles and Athletic Performance - Part 2

		Improve posture by strengthening the abdominal, back, buttocks, and torso muscles. These muscles are referred to as the stabilizer muscles. Improve balance and agility by challenging your nervous system. By developing strength in all planes of movement, the risk of injury will decrease. For example, with golf, back injuries are the most common because of underdeveloped trunk muscles. Golfers need strong abdominal muscles and back muscles to ensure proper rotation and power. These balancing muscles tire quickly during physical exertion. When that happens, your body loses its ability to make small but important course corrections on the fly. In short, you become a klutz. "Weekend climbers get so tired because the stabilizer muscles don't get used during the week," explains Meyers, an accomplished rock climber himself. Our bodies calibrate and improve balance in a number of ways, both physiologically and neurologically. Researchers who study balance focus on the stabilizer muscles, tiny strands of fibers that micromanage the movements of the spine, neck, and major joints such as the ankles, hips, and shoulders. These muscles work in concert with rapid-fire signals transmitted from the brain, which processes visual information. Ignore the stabilizer muscles for too long, and even if you have the innate balance of a gymnast, you'll eventually falter.

The Importance of Stabilizer Muscles and Body Building

		Improper, imbalanced weight training often leads to big but weak muscles. Many an ignorant bodybuilder has large muscles, but when his muscles are actually lifting weights in a real life situation, such as loading a heavy trunk onto an overhead shelf, they prove to be surprisingly weak. In other words imbalanced weightlifting can lead to imbalanced muscles. The reason is because the stabilizer muscles which give you balance from side to side are not being used in many weightlifting exercises. The stabilizer muscles need to be exercised also. This is one reason to use The Toy Pocket Gym instead of machines or free weights. Think of muscular strength as depending on a chain of muscles working in harmony to accomplish the lift. The more these secondary muscles are called upon to stabilize the joints the less motor nerve excitation is available to stimulate the prime movers. In other words, during weight training, the more stable the joint, the greater the contraction of the prime movers. For instance, just imagine you have a three feet piece of elastic cord. In this instance, the elastic cord is the muscle. If you were to tie one end of the elastic cord to a chair with wheels and pull on the other end of the elastic cord, what would happen? The elastic band would not stretch at all and the chair with wheels would roll across the floor. This is because the chair is not stable and, therefore, moves when acted upon by a force. If you were to take the same chair with wheels and bolt it to the ground and then pulled on the other end of the elastic cord, what would happen? The elastic band would stretch a lot and the anchored chair would not move at all. This is because the chair is stable and, therefore, does not move when acted upon by a force. The energy is absorbed by the elastic band and the band stretches. In order to work the Prime Movers to the maximum, the exercises performed should place the joints and bones in the optimum stable position. To complicate things, age doesn't do us any favors in matters of balance. By the time we hit 30 our ankles start to weaken, backs stiffen, and abdomens become less taut; the body's strength, flexibility, and symmetry become more difficult to maintain. Likewise, the march of years slowly deteriorates the stabilizer muscles. And piling on the hours in the weight room won't tone these diminutive fibers. The drawback to merely lifting is that it does nothing to enhance agility—the end result of balance and quickness. Strong stabilizer muscles are essential for maximizing your fitness results. Too often individuals concentrate on exercising the major muscle groups while neglecting stability training. Weak stabilizers will prevent a person from lifting heavy weight even though their major muscles can handle it.

The Importance of Stabilizer Muscles during Life Preservation System Exercises

		Using The Toy Pocket Gym, a person will achieve greater mass than he would if he did the same exercise using machine equipment. The Toy Pocket Gym use the person’s natural range of motion and strengthens the stabilizer muscles, but at disproportionate ratio to the prime movers. If one switches from machine or free weights weights to The Toy Pocket Gym they will notice that they will shake a lot. Once that person becomes adjusted to the feel of The Toy Pocket Gym his stabilizer muscles will become slightly stronger and the athlete won’t shake as much. If that same weight lifting athlete were to unload a truck load of heavy boxes, they Since free weight machines are locked into a specific range of motion and help to support the weight along that path, they fail to stimulate the muscles that surround the area you are working (stabilizers). This is a mistake. If your stabilizer muscles are weak, then the major muscle group will never grow! If you've ever used or seen weight machines before, and saw how easily weights were lifted up and down in the perfect arc so many free weight users try to duplicate. By working with The Toy Pocket Gym, you are not doing the lift in an exact range of motion; it is your goal to make it as exact as possible, and the muscles which help you to achieve this are your stabilizer muscles. When bench pressing on a weight machine, the range of motion is already set, and your stabilizer muscles do not have to work at all to keep perfect form. If your left side is lagging in bench press, you will never know this with machines. You will continue to train, and quite possibly see your lagging strength deficits on your left side, continue to get worse. The Toy Pocket Gym prevents this from happening, by working your stabilizer muscles in all planes of motion. While doing bench press, you will also find the motion is stabilized with your lower back and abdominal muscles. It is truly amazing to see just how much more (and beneficial) work your body does with The Toy Pocket Gym. The main reason for this is a lack of stabilizer and synergist muscle development. Stabilizer and synergist muscles are supporting muscles that assist the main muscle in performing a complex lift. The more stabilizers and synergists worked, the more muscle fibers stimulated. Multi-jointed free weight exercises like the bench press, require many stabilizer and synergistic muscle assistance to complete the lift. On the other hand doing a bench press using a machine will need almost no stabilizer assistance.