Stability: The Foundation of Human Movement

Stability is foundational to safe movement which makes it critical to the first rule of exercise:

Don’t get hurt.

Injuries are devastating for a few reasons, the most convincing of which is that they take you out of the game. No amount of fitness will help you if you are injured and have to stop exercising and doing the things you love to do.

To prevent injury, let’s start by understanding and avoiding two common mistakes that cause them so we can safely and confidently engage in exercise and other physical activities we enjoy.

Mistake 1: The “go hard or go home” mentality. If this mindset was against the law, I’d be locked up for twenty-five to life.

Having this mentality isn’t bad—it can be extremely beneficial at times. But to use it to your advantage and prevent it from causing injury, it must be harnessed.

If your approach to every workout is to always do more, go harder, and lift heavier, teach yourself to relax and dial it down some days. It’s not easy, but if my caveman brain can do it, you certainly can too.

Mistake 2: Performing movements incorrectly. This is a broad and deep bucket. 

Mere mortals like you and I will probably never master proper movement patterns to the nuance and specificity that top-tier exercise physiologists like Dr. Kelly Starrett (the guy has a 480-page book on how to move correctly, very useful but quite an involved read) demand.

But I don’t think we have to be perfect.

We just have to be good enough so that we avoid injury in the short term and prevent imbalances and mobility issues in the long term. 

Understanding the principles of and training for stability enables us to move right—without reading 480 head-spinning pages on the nuanced details of movement—which ultimately reduces our risk of injury.

Stability Defined 

Stability is our subconscious ability to harness, decelerate, or stop force.

As Dr. Peter Attia wrote in Outlive:

“A stable person can react to internal or external stimuli to adjust position and muscular tension appropriately without a tremendous amount of conscious thought.”

Without stability, strong muscles aren’t much use.

A stable body can transmit force to and absorb force from the outside world without energy leak (aka force dissipation).

If walking up or down a flight of stairs hurts your back or knees, there is an energy leak somewhere.

That means there is a kink in the chain of force moving through your feet and towards the centre of your body via the ankles, knees, hips, and back.

Stability training teaches us to prevent energy leaks so we can transmit and absorb force safely.

A high quality of life isn’t just about being strong and having good endurance, but also being free of pain and injury.

Stability completes that trifecta.

Becoming the Mountain Goat

Cooling down from one of our runs last week, I joked with my brother that my spirit animal is a mountain goat.

Or at least that’s what I’m striving for. 

Mountain goats are stronger than they look (a mountain goat killed a grizzly bear in my home country of Canada a few summers ago), glide up steep mountains with ease, and gracefully navigate tough and uneven terrain.

They are the perfect combination of strength, endurance, and… stability.

We want to be able to lift our body weight, touch our toes, run up a mountain, play our sport, and carry out the activities of daily living with ease and energy and without injury. 

Training for stability is a key piece to that puzzle as it enables our muscles to safely and powerfully transmit force across our entire body while protecting vulnerable areas like our back and knees. 

When we’re stable, we can interact with our environment in a strong, fluid, flexible, and agile manner which lets us keep doing what we love to do.

The Five Components of Stability

Component #1: Breath

Stability starts with the breath.

How you breathe is who you are—physically, mentally, and emotionally.

When you have a nerve-racking presentation or meeting, your fight or flight response (sympathetic nervous system) is engaged and your breathing becomes rapid, erratic, and ragged. Poor breathing can also impede your motor control and increase your risk of injury.

But when you breathe deep and steady, the calming parasympathetic nervous system is activated and you are cool, calm, collected, and in control.

Learning to Breath Again

“Making sure that your breath can be wide and three-dimensional and easy is vital for creating good, efficient, coordinated movement.” — Beth Lewis

Breathing properly is important because it has so many downstream impacts on our movement and mindstate.

Physically, it affects our rib position, neck extension, the shape of our spine, and the position of our feet on the ground, all of which are critical to our stability.

Mentally and emotionally, how we breathe has a massive impact on how we feel. And it goes both ways—our breathing isn’t simply a byproduct of how we feel.

We can change our state by altering our breath. That means anxiety, nerves, stress, and other negative states can be fixed or improved by breathing better.

A proper inhalation expands the belly and the entire rib cage—front, sides, and back—and should be quiet.

It’s a sign of suboptimal breathing if your breath is noisy or if your neck, chest, or belly moves first on the inhale.

Breathing Test: Identify Your Default Breathing Pattern

Lie on your back, placing one hand on your chest and the other on your belly, and breathe normally (3-minute demo here).

Try not to put any extra effort or thought into it so that your breathing resembles how you normally breathe.

Pay attention to which hand is rising and falling. Belly? Chest? Both? Neither?

Most people fit into one of three breathing styles:

• Hyperinflated: Upper-chest breathers flare their ribs and expand their chest on the inhale, while the belly is flat or falls. This creates tightness in the upper body and through the middle of the body (the midline) and, if the ribs stay flared, makes it difficult to exhale fully.

• Compressed: Compressed (scrunched down and tight) breathers jut their head and shoulders forward and have difficulty moving air in and out altogether because they cannot expand their rib cage on the inhale. 

• Uncontrolled: People that breathe primarily "into" the belly, which tilts the pelvis forward. These breathers typically have extreme flexibility but lack control which makes them prone to joint injuries.

Breathing Exercise: Build Awareness and Strengthen Your Diaphragm 

Use this breathing exercise to build breath awareness and strengthen your diaphragm:

1. Lie on your back with your legs up on a bench or chair.

2. Inhale as quietly as possible with the least amount of movement possible.

3. Exhale fully through pursed lips for maximum air resistance to strengthen the diaphragm. Empty your lungs completely before your shoulders round or your face or jaw gets tense. A full exhale prepares you for a good inhale.

4. Pause for at least two seconds after each exhale to hold the isometric contraction.

5. Repeat for 5 breaths and do 2-3 sets total.

Component #2: Feet

Our feet are the foundation of our contact with the world. 

Pronation and supination are common foot flaws and expose us to the risk of knee injury and plantar fasciitis.

• Pronate: Leaning the feet inwards. Your foot rolls inward when you walk.

• Supinate: Leaning the feet outwards. Your foot rolls outward when you walk.

When performing any standing exercise, minimize these faults by planting your entire foot firmly in contact with the ground. To do so, think of your foot as having four corners—base of big toe, base of pinky toe, inside heel, and outside heel—and distribute your weight evenly throughout them.

You can also experiment with barefoot exercise which will enhance your ability to feel the ground with your feet.

I’ve been lifting barefoot for two years and can attest that it improves your connection with the ground (a key component of balance) and helps to prevent pronation and supination.

Feet Exercises for Stability

Toe Yoga

As someone with horrible toe dexterity, the notion of toe yoga is infuriating.

But our toes play a crucial yet overlooked role in walking, running, lifting, and decelerating. 

Watch this two-minute video to get started with toe yoga.

The “Putting On Your Shoes” Drill

Our capacity to balance on one leg beyond age fifty is correlated with future longevity.

Use every time you put on socks and shoes as an opportunity to improve your balance.

Balance on one foot, put on your sock, then your shoe, and then tie it.

You have to stay balanced on one foot the entire time but you can use any strategy or approach you like.

Component #3: Spine

Our spine is extremely vulnerable to instability, as evidenced by widespread back pain.

That means our spine has the most to benefit from stability training.

The spine has three sections:

• Cervical (neck)

• Thoracic (mid-back)

• Lumbar (lower back)

Our screen-dependent and smartphone-addicted lives wreak havoc on our spine and leave us with posture resembling that of Ebenezer Scrooge.

When I go days without my standing desk and end up sitting at a computer all day, I can feel my shoulders rounding and my neck craning.

To protect your spine, spend less time looking down at your phone.

And when you do need to go on your phone, be the weirdo who holds it up to eye level—this will not only protect your neck but also minimize screen time as your shoulders will quickly fatigue in this position. 

We should also focus on developing bodily awareness around our spine.

This will improve your ability to notice when you’re bending back (extension) or forward (flexion) anywhere along the spine. 

To develop this awareness and reconnect with your vertebrae, the backbones that compose your spine, spend some time doing the cat/cow sequence in an extremely slow manner.

Inhale on cow. Exhale on cat. Learning to feel the position of each vertebra will enable you to better distribute force through your spine.

Component #4: Shoulder Blades

The shoulder blades, or scapulae, sit on top of the ribs on the upper back and have a great ability to move around.

They help move our arms but many of us have lost our ability to contract and control them.

A key part of stability training is to establish neuromuscular control, the connection between our brain and key muscles and joints.

An exercise called scapular CARs (controlled articular rotations) can improve your scapular positioning and control.

Component #5: Hands and Fingers

Our feet absorb force whereas our hands and fingers transmit force to the external world.

Transmitting and modulating force through your hands comes down to pushing and pulling effectively.

But weak fingers and hands increase the risk of elbow and shoulder injury.

Just as we must focus on grounding and evenly distributing weight throughout the feet while performing standing lifts, we must initiate upper body movements with the hands and employ all of the fingers.

You can train grip by adding carries such as farmer’s walks to your exercise protocol.

But it is important that you pay attention to what your fingers are doing during the movement and how force is passing through them.

Our hands and feet are what connect us to our environment and let our muscles and bones do what they were built to do.

Simply paying more attention to the quality of their connection can help you interact with the world in a more stable way.

That’s all, folks. Thanks for reading!

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Much love to you and yours,

Jack Dixon