I have been following that thread with great interest, as I am sure many of you have been. I am not as interested in the clash of titams inasmuch as I am interested in what I have learned from the ongoing discussion. Summing things up so far, It has been an ongoing debate on this and many other forums that in training for sport, there is little or no transfer from using instability.
Some of you may remember that I was at one time a big advocate of balance training (a couple of years ago). Since being handed my ass on a thread, I went on a quest to study more on the topic, and have read numerous articles from people like Eric Cressy, Bill Hartman, Dos Remedios, etc, that have led me to conclude that there is little use for it in training for sport.
From what I have learned from Bill and Dos, training for expressing strength relies heavily on “feed-forward” mechanisms, not “feed-back”, which is what balance training essentially trains. In other words, if you were training someone specifically to be faster in the first 200ms of an action, the last thing in the world you would do is plop them on a ball! It doesn’t develop EITHER developing or expressing strength.
Paraphrasing Bill talking about balance training in golf (a big trend for those who ever watch the golf channel), learning to drive a ball while balanced on a wobble board only has transfer if you actually play golf while balanced on a wobble board.
Comments or feedback?