Unstable Surface Training...

Tyler here. I have recently returned from the fictional escapades that Kristyn had been dreaming up for me.

A trend I have noticed lately here at the club is an uptick in members utilizing unstable surfaces as part of their training.

This is something that always catches my eye, as it is not something that research supports, and is something I strongly oppose anywhere outside of a rehab setting. While I understand the rationale behind it, it doesn’t hold up against the research, and falls apart when put under scrutiny.

But “it makes balancing on one leg harder, and therefore must help my balance, right?”. Yeah, I see how you think that, but here’s the thing. Unstable surface training positively affects proprioception at the ankle after an injury, but has dramatically diminishing returns outside of the acute injury phase, and can actually be detrimental towards athletic performance in a healthy individual.
While you may have done it before at physical therapy, that doesn’t make it a good exercise to keep doing once you’re done with PT. Why, because unstable surface training when performed by healthy individuals, actually slows your reaction time.

There is a short period of time between your ankle muscles absorbing force and reproducing force in the opposite direction (think stepping for and hitting a tennis ball) called the amortization phase. We want this phase to be as short as possible. When you injure your ankle, this phase gets increased, which is one of the things that makes your ankle feel unstable.

Unstable surface training (balancing on a pad) helps the tissues in the area recover that ability and shorten that period back up to a good range. In a healthy individual (someone without injury or greater than 6 weeks after and ankle injury) that balancing pad actually starts to increase the length of the amortization phase again.

This is a bad thing for anyone who partakes in athletics, because it ultimately increases hesitation, and slows your ability to move quickly in reaction to something relative to your sport.

While you can find studies that say unstable surface training increases performance, their methodology is usually garbage, and not well controlled. When you look at the data as a whole, and look at the populations studied, it becomes very clear its at best not beneficial, and at worst detrimental.

How do you increase your balance then? Well, by being stronger. The stronger you are, the more force you can produce, and the greater speeds you can produce it at. That is what power is. High speed of force development. Unstable surfaces directly take that ability away.

So, if you want to improve your agility and performance, ditch the pad, and grab a barbell.

~Tyler

Cressey, E. (2008). The Truth About Unstable Surface Training. Link to Article