Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights_ - Alex Hutchinson [19]
Two recent studies by University of Calgary physiotherapist Carolyn Emery and her colleagues followed more than 1,000 high school basketball players and physical education students in randomized trials of wobble-board balance training. In both cases, balance training reduced injuries. The rate of ankle injuries among basketball players, for instance, was 36 percent lower in the balance-training group.
Still, critics point to a pair of studies that associated balance training with increased injury risk. The first was a 2000 study of 221 Swedish soccer players that observed four knee ligament injuries in the balance-training group versus just one in the control group—numbers that are too small to draw firm conclusions from. The second was a 2004 study of Dutch and Norwegian volleyball players that saw an increase in knee injuries for players with a prior history of knee problems. “These results are somewhat surprising, and we do need to be mindful of them,” says Con Hrysomallis, a researcher at Victoria University in Australia who reviewed 21 similar studies across a variety of sports in a 2007 article in the journal Sports Medicine. The two negative studies were the only ones that had subjects throwing and catching balls while on a wobble board, as opposed to simpler exercises, he notes.
The overall message from the studies Hrysomallis reviewed is positive, he says. Studies have consistently found that balance training, along with other “neuromuscular” exercise such as jumping and agility drills, can reduce injury risk in sports such as soccer, basketball, and volleyball. There’s also some evidence that simple balancing drills can reduce the risk of falls in older people.
That doesn’t mean you should start doing all your exercises on unstable surfaces. If you do a bench press while lying on an exercise ball, you won’t be able to lift as much weight, so you’ll gain less strength. As a 2007 study of soccer players at the University of Connecticut concluded, too much training on unstable surfaces “may create a hesitant athlete for whom stability is gained at the expense of mobility and force production.” Interestingly, another recent study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research found that for subjects who already have a lot of experience training with free weights, moderately unstable platforms (such as Bosu balls and Dyna Discs) don’t appear to stimulate any additional muscle activation compared with stable surfaces. The authors conclude from this that simply using free weights is enough to keep your “stabilizer” muscles in good shape.
Add up the evidence, and you’re left with a familiar message: moderation. Balance training can be a useful tool to help prevent lower-leg injuries, and perhaps to ward off falls as you get older. But if you spend too much time on the exercise ball, you’ll be missing out on other training benefits.
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