Adding perturbations to an exercise basically means to manually disturb the stability of a given exercise.  The goal is to make the environment more unpredictable and increase the stability challenge of the exercise, movement pattern or muscle groups used.  I’ve been introduced to this concept a couple years ago at the Optimal Shoulder Performance seminar.  This is a concept that Mike Reinold was (and still is to this day) using for rotator cuff exercises with his baseball pitchers.

A typical exercise would put the athlete in a given position and the coach or trainer would give manual perturbations to the arm to challenge the stability of the humeral head in the shoulder joint, and improve the stabilization ability of the rotator cuff muscles for injury prevention purposes.

I immediately embraced the concept as I thought it was a genius idea, and I’ve been using rhythmic stabilization exercises for the rotator cuff ever since.

The concept can also be applied with other types of exercises…

Any exercise with the purpose of improving stability could be a candidate for a progression using perturbations.

When you’re trying to improve stability, your body and your brain need to be challenged.  This is why so many people use the stability ball; it increases the challenge of stability and makes you work harder.  The thing with stability balls is that they’re not always used smartly, and not always by smart people.  But I digress.

Hint: NOT the smart kind.

A lot of core exercises designed to improve stability can be progressed to manual perturbation.  As I’ve mentioned above, the perturbation will help improve control and stability.  When training stability, the important thing to remember is that motor control (which is the brain-to-muscle connection that works to improve stability) can not be improved unless it fails to succeed doing certain tasks.  Your brain needs to be challenged beyond its own stability limitations.  If you always work within your strengths, or your current level of stability, you’re not going to improve.  This is a great point that Mike Reinold highlighted in Functional Stability for the Core.

How do you actually apply this?

It could be something as simple as adding manual perturbations to a front plank.  A mastery of the front plank is in order before attempting any type of manual perturbation to your clients or athletes.  The same concept can also be applied to other core exercises like dead bugs, belly press, glute bridges, bird dogs, etc.

Again the important thing is to follow the progression; make sure your client or athlete is efficient at the basic exercises and doesn’t compensate in any way.  The logical progression for any exercise would be:

1. Stable
2. Stable with perturbation
3. Unstable
4. Unstable with perturbation

Using this progression with a front plank, the progression might look something like this:

1. Front plank
2. Front plank with perturbation
3. Stability ball front plank
4. Stability ball front plank with perturbation

The idea with the manual perturbations is to make it challenging and push it just beyond the point where the athlete or client maintains perfect form, but it shouldn’t be unbearable- if that makes any sense.

If you want more ideas on how to incorporate perturbations/rhythmic stabilization you should definitely check out Eric Cressey and Mike Reinold’s Functional Stability for the Core.

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The neutral spine concept has been widely accepted as one of the norms for good movement by now.  It is understood that it is one of the basics of functional movements, and it is extremely important when moving external loads.

With athletes lifting weights this would translate into making sure they always squat, deadlift, do core exercises, and any hip extension based movement with a neutral spine.  Most high level athletes don’t have a hard time at all grasping that concept, especially when they’ve learned to lift the right way.  But with younger athletes who are just learning to lift, or with deconditioned clients, what’s the first step in being able to perform lifting exercises with a neutral spine?  Well, you need to teach them neutral spine first!

This looks like a pretty solid neutral spine to me

Including exercises such as planks, birddogs, and bridges that help reinforce neutral spine seem like a good place to start, but if your athlete or client doesn’t understand what neutral spine is, odds are he won’t be able to get it.  And they won’t have the ability to keep a neutral spine under challenging situations like lifting heavy weights, or moving at high velocities.

Teaching neutral spine in different positions is the first step.  Make your athletes or clients feel what neutral spine feels like in different positions, coach them as much as possible, make sure they really get it.  Mike Reinolds delves into that stuff quite a bit in Eric Cressey’s and his Functional Stability Training DVD set.  This is a seminar they held at Cressey Performance a couple of months ago that they put on DVD and just released to the public.  Mike emphasizes the 3 step process before allowing anything to move:

1. Find neutral

2. Brace

3. Breathe

Whether you’re teaching neutral spine using a plank, birddog, bridge or dead bug you should follow the same pattern.  Make the client flex and extend his spine a couple of times, and make him find neutral somewhere in between.  Coach the client as much as possible, and make sure that in the end they can find it by themselves.  From there, brace just hard enough that you’ll maintain neutral (brace shouldn’t be a max effort unless you’re lifting max effort weights), and breathe.  As a rule of thumb, if you can’t breathe through your brace, you’re bracing too hard.

You don’t need to brace THAT hard

One tool that we like to use to teach neutral spine that I like a lot with our athletes at Endeavor is the hip hinge with a dowel.  It is very basic, it gives physical cues (with the points of contact of the dowel on your back) and it’s easy to know when you’re not doing it right.  Again the same concept applies: find neutral, brace, breathe.

If you want to learn more about that and how to train according to the neutral spine concept when training your core, your lower body and with any lifting exercise really, I suggest you pick up a copy of Eric Cressey and Mike Reinolds’ Functional Stability Training.  They just released it and you can get at the introductory price until Sunday at midnight; after that the price will go up.  You can check it out HERE.

Don’t forget the best thing of them all….signing up for my FREE newsletter! Just enter your info below and I’ll send you 3 reports on sports performance training and injury prevention.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m a huge fan of random thoughts posts, both when I write for my own website and also when I read other people’s blogs.  I think it’s a great way to transmit many different ideas/topics while keeping the read short.  So without further, here’s my newest edition of random thoughts!

1. I just had my first article published on SportsRehabExpert.com last week.  For those of you who don’t already know the website, it’s an amazing resource for fitness professionals from physical therapists, to chiropractors, to strength coaches.  The website brings you THE MOST up-to-date information on sports and orthopedic rehab and injury prevention available on the internet.  It is a membership site, but you can join today for only 1$! With names like Gray Cook, Mike Boyle, Eric Cressey, Mike Reinolds and Charlie Weingroff contributing to the website, you’d be crazy not to take advantage of this offer!  Needless to say that I’m really excited about writing for SportsRehabExpert.com ; it is quite an honor for me to be lined up next to those big names! You can join today by clicking on the banner below.

2. A while ago, my colleague Eric Cressey posted a picture of his med ball graveyard.

Upon seeing that picture, I was like:”How is that possible to have this many cracked medicine balls?”.  At the time, we had yet to have one pop at Endeavor!  But that was almost a year ago.  A hockey off-season and a baseball off-season later, we’re catching up!

We’re nowhere close to where Cressey Performance is yet, but it feels good to know that our athletes too can pop medicine balls!

3. I have only a couple spots left for my online program design services.  If you’re looking for a quality program that will bring you the results and make you feel better than ever (read: pain and injury free), shoot me an e-mail and I’ll take care of you.  Don’t settle for the cookie-cutter program you’ll find in a fitness magazine that won’t do anything for you anyway.  Save yourself the hassle of writing your own program, and have someone write a smart, no B.S. program geared toward your specific needs and your specific goals.  You’ll achieve your fitness goals way faster than you ever thought possible!  Visit my Services page for more details.

4. I’ve been food shopping at Whole Foods for a little while now, and I must say it is the smartest nutrition related decision I could have made.  For those who live outside the US, Whole Foods is a mostly organic grocery store that carry the freshest produce and the highest quality food.  It’s simply amazing!  You won’t see this kind of sign in any other grocery store:

Not only do they carry the best quality foods around, by they also encourage people to eat healthy and they make proper recommendations (like this one on the sign) about the basics of healthy dietary habits.

5. A big shout out to the Comcast U-18 AAA hockey team who qualified for the Nationals this past weekend by winning the USA Hockey Atlantic District.  Jared, our boss at Endeavor is the head coach of the team and we train most of the players on the team in the off-season and some of them throughout the season as well.  They won a best of 3 series with their biggest rivals, the Junior Flyers.  They won the first game 5-1, lost the second 5-4 and won the decisive game 9-2 in an amazing game!  Congratulations guys!

6. I set a new deadlift PR yesterday!  I haven’t been deadlifting very heavily lately.  To make a long story short, I messed up my back a couple weeks ago and it’s been bothering me ever since and one of my knee is pretty banged up.  Despite the fact that my whole body is a mess right now, I managed to pull 445, and did it totally pain free!  Needless to say that I’m pretty excited about that new PR…and even more about the fact that my body’s feeling great with heavy loads again.  445 might not be that much, but in my situation right now, I’m pretty pleased with that.  And the next couple of weeks are looking pretty good!