If you train at a commercial gym, you've probably seen these things lying around. Maybe your gym (like mine) has an entire rack dedicated to them. At first, they seem like a perfect fit for extreme trainers. I'm talking about stability balls (a/k/a Swiss balls), of course.
The idea here, and it seems to be a good one, is that you activate more muscles by training on an unstable surface. The ball provides a surface that has the potential to wiggle and shift, and your body must respond by activating various so-called stabilizer muscles. But is that really what happens?
there are some published medical studies which seem to indicate that training on a stability ball doesn't really produce better muscle recruitment than traditional weight training exercises. A study published in the January 2008 issue of the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research concluded that doing regular old squats and deadlifts worked the trunk muscles better than stability ball training. Another article in that same issue examined upper body weight training and found no difference in strength and muscle activation on a swiss ball (barbell) bench press versus a tradtional flat bench.
Really, the only research I found supporting the use of a stability ball was for abdominal work. Lying with your mid to upper back (but not the lower back) on a stability ball and doing crunches out of that position, seems to activate more muscles than traditional crunches.
Stability ball training is another tool that you can use for variation in training, but now that the research is in, it's becoming clear that it isn't going to replace traditional weight training for getting and strong and fit.
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