Stabilizer Muscles

 

I never really had the need to describe stabilizer muscles though I often mention it, but us meat heads in the gym don't care quite so much about those things so I don't get the chance to tell people much about them. As a result, most about 95% of those huge guys you see benching 300 pounds or whatever, have really poor stabilizer muscles, little do they know about the benefits about it. 

Secondary muscle  that help stabilize and assist the main muscle does not necessarily mean stabilizer muscle.

For instance, a secondary muscle used for pull ups can be biceps, or your flexor digitorums, but that doesn't make your biceps a stabilizer muscle.

It can be subjective based on the type of exercise as to what is a stabilizer or a mover muscle.

Stabilizers are stabilizers period, they are used to hold your mover muscles/joints/etc in place to prevent injuries as mentioned, but it goes further then that in such that its meant to limit movement as well.

You wouldn't want, for instance your shoulder socket to pop down when you are holding a weight above your head, or backwards when you are doing bench pressing, etc. The stabilizer muscles supraspinatus, infraspinatus, subscapularis, teres minor work to prevent your arm from injury, or having parts fall off like your socket.

How does this apply in the gym other then that you will decrease your chances of injury?
Your mover muscles by the way, are well, the muscles you use to move. Biceps, triceps, quads, hamstrings, and so on.
The stabilizers as mentioned, are used to prevent injury by holding those mover muscles in place or preventing mover muscles and its affiliated joint/bone from reaching awkward out of bound areas.

How to tell if your stabilizers are used more at a glance?

Get a heavy weight for a particular exercise such as bench pressing, tire yourself out with the exercise a bit, and then hold that weight about halfway. If your arms are shaking like mad, you could use some work on the stabilizers that pertain to that particular movement. Good stabilizers should help you maintain and keep that weight up there as stable as possible.

Heavy weight lifters underestimate this and focus on superficial (outer) muscles, with very weak inner muscles which are usually the stabilizers.

This imbalance explains why these monstrous guys, can bench 300 pounds, and can't do more then 20 push ups on a stability ball. You should try it sometime, get a stability ball, level your hands a bit more then shoulder distance on the ball, and try doing push ups, it is a good exercise for your shoulder stabilizers (newbies beware of falling off on your face or shaking terribly). Typically, a personal trainer is suppose to help you gain stability skills first before proceeding onto strength and power, because it would actually improve your overall performance (so those guys don't realize that their peak of 300 pounds could have been 330 or whatever if they had worked on stabilizers).

Martial arts has a heavy focus on stabilizer muscles as you might have guessed by now, since most calisthenic exercises require stabilizers.

You can probably also visualize why free weight works on stabilizers more then machines. Machine apparatuses are set, immovable and very stable, your stabilizers don't need to work to keep the bar at this certain height, etc.

Free weights require that your body uses the stabilizers or else you'd be in risk of dropping it, etc.


http://ehealthforum.com/health/stabilizer-muscles-and-deep-core-muscles-t157132.html