What are stabilizer muscles?

It’s getting hard to read an article today without reading that the stabilizer muscles must be strong enough in order for the movement to be executed effectively. These stabilizer muscles are so important that you must do supplementary exercises to strengthen them. According to the “experts” these stabilizer muscles are the key to success in exercise execution.

But yet, if you open up a kinesiology or anatomy book and look for stabilizer muscle you will not find any such category. You can however, find that a muscle can ACT as a stabilizer during execution of a movement. It is analogous to a muscle acting as an agonist or antagonist or synergist. Understand that muscles have different functions depending upon how they are recruited for the particular task at hand. The same muscle can act as an agonist in one exercise an antagonist in an opposite exercise, a stabilizer in another exercise or synergist, etc. in still other exercises.

Most often a muscle acts as a stabilizer in order to allow a different muscle to function as needed in the exercise. For example, the hip joint muscles may contract to stabilize the pelvis so that you can do an effective abdominal exercise. In this case the muscles acting as stabilizers hold the pelvis in place so that the abdominal muscles, when they contract, would raise the torso and not simultaneously raise the pelvis. Understand that when a muscle contracts it pulls equally from both ends. In order to have movement at only one end of the muscle other muscles must come into play to stabilize the bone to which the other end of the muscle is attached, in place.

But somehow it appears that these so-called experts who talk about stabilizer muscles as a specific kind of muscle and the need to strengthen them, never cracked a kinesiology or anatomy book. I find this to be a disturbing trend in the exercise field. All it takes to be an expert is to write an article and have it appear on the web. Sadly many of these so-called experts are also certified. It makes one wonder what they cover in the certification programs. But even here anyone can create a certification agency and give out certificates after payment.

For every step forward it seems as though we’re taking two steps backward. Isn’t it time for some organization to take the lead in relation to dissemination of accurate and sound information and to put the so-called experts in place?

For more information on the role and function of muscles during exercise read Biomechanics and Kinesiology Of Exercise