Proprioceptive exercise: serve really? and which exercise?

Today is becoming a common practice in the handball fields, but also in other team sports, see athlete make exercise on proprioceptive tablets, mats, bearings or anything that can give an instability at the level of ankles. Seems that in recent time it is impossible play sport without exercise with instability. Personally I think that this thing must be analyzes before “sanctify” or “demonize” a training method.

First of all it is important to underlined that the instability to insert on an exercise it isn’t only one, low and applied to feet, but exist also a medium and a high one (respectively at the level of pelvis and shoulders). Surely should be used all this three type of instability…but which is the best? A question that I made is: these tablets, mats, ecc…lead to a specific training? The answer is NO! I don’t think that during an handball match the floor suddenly could inclined or become instable, e this reasoning is supported by the scientific studies on this topic, in particular those of the research group of Bhem D.G. that has emphasized that reflexes stimulated on a proprioceptive tablet are different respect those that are used during an action on a stable surface: in the case of an instable surface the reflex activated is called “tilting reflex” that is different from that used by the body when is on a stable surface that is called “righting reflex”.

Thus, we train a reflex that during handball match is not stimulated. Furthermore was demonstrated that make an exercise on instable surface, like a squat in the picture for example, reduced the output of the power and thus doesn’t permit the better training for the athlete…and I think that increase the risk of injury during training…isn’t it?

 

With all this I don’t want to say that is inadvisable do proprioceptive exercise, rather I believe that are exercise very important in our sport where ankles and knees are stressed in a maximal way, but I think that these drills should be view like a training for the prevention of injury and not like training for example of the power and strength also with the use of overloads.

In my opinion these drills should take less space in the process of training respect the custom of nowadays, leaving more time for drills that include a different instability, more specific like at the level of pelvis or shoulders. If we think about the specific actions of handball, often player have to deal with sudden lost of stability during fly action due to a contact with an opponent, at level of pelvis or upper limbs, and player have to restore immediately his balance. Tools useful to train these abilities are waterbag, sandbag, elastic band, swissball o simply the help of a team mate.

Talking about the swissball, I think that is a fantastic tools and that could be used for many functional exercises for team sports; for this reason in the next week I’ll spend some post on the use of this tools.

I hope to give you useful information about this topic sometimes little known.

Greetings