Active vs Passive Stability
How can training with instability protect your joints and improve your coordination? In the ever-changing, high-pressure world of sports, stability is key to success. However, not all forms of stability are created equal. Athletes often unknowingly rely on dangerous, passive stability that can lead to injury. The good news is that there’s a safer, more effective way to create stability, and it comes through actively engaging the muscles around the joint. In this article, we'll explore the difference between active and passive stability, and how training with Ultimate Instability can help athletes develop the type of stability that enhances performance and reduces injury risk.
Risky Passive Stability:
Passive stability is what happens when the joint reaches the end of its range of motion, and joints are locked by stretching passive tissues like muscles and tendons to their limits. This form of stability is inherently risky. It’s a "last resort" mechanism that the body uses when it can't generate enough active stability. While passive stability might help you control a movement, locking the joint and providing stability, it comes at a high cost: it increases the risk of joint, muscle, and tendon injuries, especially in the unpredictable environments of competitive sports. Take the ankle joint for example, a common area for injury in sport, when stabilised passively - it “sinks” into deep dorsiflexion, leaning on the end-range of joint motion to lock the joint and stabilise the lower leg.
The Dangers of Passive Stability:
Relying on passive stability is like walking a tightrope—one misstep and the consequences can be severe. When athletes depend on passive stability, they’re putting their muscles and tendons under extreme stress by stretching the tissues beyond their optimal functioning length. This stress can lead to injuries that not only take athletes out of the game but can also have long-term impacts on their performance. For instance, in open-skill sports where the athlete’s environment is chaotic and there is the pressure of time, an athlete can often try to simplify coordination by locking joints. If they do this by relying on passive stability and stretching muscles and tendons to their end-range of motion, it can result in sprains, strains, or even more severe injuries like ligament tears. Simply put, passive stability is an inadequate way for athletes to simplify their bodies and better control their movement in unpredictable, ever-changing environments.
The Solution is Active Stability:
Active joint stability is the stability your body creates when muscles on both sides of the joint co-contract, locking the joints and preventing dangerous ranges of motion. When the agonist (prime mover) and antagonist (opposing muscle) contract together they actively protect the joint.
Active joint stability, as a result of co-contractions of the muscles, creates dynamic stability and control during high-intensity movements. A secondary benefit of active stability through co-contractions is improved coordination. According to Nicolai Bernstein’s discoveries in motor control, active stability locks joints and simplifies coordination by freezing degrees of freedom, making it easier for athletes to coordinate their actions. When a degree of freedom is frozen, a possible, unnecessary movement is essentially avoided (for example bending of the elbow can be avoided by tensing your arm muscles and contracting both the biceps and triceps muscles simultaneously). This means that there is one less irrelevant joint movement to think about when coordinating movement and the body can focus on organising all the other joints essential to creating the successful movement pattern.
Essentially there are two major benefits to active joint stability:
- Co-contractions dynamically stabilise the joint and protect it from dangerous ranges of motion which would otherwise incur injury
- When the joint is locked, the body doesn’t have to control it. Hence coordinating the body becomes simpler (thinking space is freed up for decision-making and perception for example) and movement in sports is improved
The role of unstable weights in creating active stability:
Unlike traditional weights, the water within ultimate instability moves unpredictably, forcing the muscles to co-contract to stabilize the body. These co-contractions lock the joints, preventing them from reaching those risky end-range positions. As a result, athletes actively create joint stability, which not only protects them from injury but also improves their coordination and motor control. When the environment is complex, the body needs to be simple. Only this way can athletes achieve those seemingly impossible, extraordinary feats of coordination that enable them to make a game-winning play.
When athletes lack the motor control required to navigate their chaotic environments, they freeze the degrees of freedom by “sinking in”, literally leaning on the limit of the joint's range of motion. This pushes muscles and tendons to their limits, putting them at a higher risk of injury. The body resorts to passive stability when it doesn’t have the active stability it needs to safely perform movements. However, this reliance on passive mechanisms is unsustainable and can lead to serious injury.
Active stability, on the other hand, is the safer, more effective alternative. By training with the instability of water, your muscles will learn to co-contract, locking the joints preventing injury, and improving coordination in the chaos of sport. As you work to control the unpredictable movement of the water, your body learns to stabilise itself spontaneously. Below is a practical example of an exercise that puts the body under pressure to quickly stabilise the ankle joint. In this cleverly designed exercise featuring time pressure and instability, the athlete is nudged toward the safer, more effective solution and learns to actively stabilise the joint through co-contractions.
Conclusion: Take Control of Your Stability
In the quest to move well in sport, stability is crucial—but it’s important to rely on the right kind of stability. All too often athletes rely unconsciously on passive stability during complex movements in light of uncertainty. This however is a risky approach that can lead to injury. Active stability, developed through training with instability, is the key to safe, effective, and adaptable movement patterns. Start training for active stability today. Below is a YouTube playlist demonstrating some exercises specifically designed to develop co-contractions, lock joints, and simplify the body to improve motor control in sport:
To learn more about active stability check out our e-learning courses, they dive deeper into the role of perturbation in training, explore how to harness instability to improve coordination in athletes, and provide more practical solutions to coaches, physiotherapists, and athletes to improve performance and prevent injury.
