The WORST Balance Training (unstable surface)

Many people do their balance training on unstable surfaces (such as balance pads, Bosu balls, or even slacklines). What do they hope to achieve from this? Improving their balance for sports, reducing the risk of injury, and enhancing performance. In this article, you’ll learn why none of this can be achieved on unstable surfaces.

How High Is the Transfer of These Exercises?

With transfer, I mean: Does it have an effect on other exercises or movements if you improve your balance on an unstable surface? This question was answered by Kramer & Giboin in 2019.

They conducted a study with three groups: Group a trained on a tilting board; Group b trained on a wobble board, and Group c received no training. I’ll show you a picture of the unstable training devices here:

Theoretically, people training on the tilting board should also improve on the wobble board if there were a transfer, right? However, that didn’t happen.

Let’s take a look at what actually happened.

In the graphic, you can see green and blue bars. The green bars show, the balance skills before they started working on their balance. The blue bars show the results after they completed their training program.

To measure the effectiveness of the training, they had the participants perform two tasks: Balancing on the tilting board (T-ML) and balancing on the wobble board (P-ML).

The vertical axis shows, how long they were able to hold their balance.

The group that trained on the tilting board only became significantly better on the tilting board. The same goes for the group with the wobble board. They only got better on the wobble board.

As you can see – all groups got better (even the Control Group, which received no training at all). That’s because just by performing the test, you get better at performing the test.

So please be careful when therapists want to show you how great their treatment worked, when having you perform the same test twice.

Alright – let’s get back to balance training.

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Why Is It That You Only Get Better at the Task You Are Performing?

Well – there are two perspectives you need to know.

Perspective 1: Balance is a higher-order ability, which means that training one or more balance tasks leads to improved overall balance. This would then positively influence your performance in general. That’s the perspective many people have (and I had as well for a long time).

Perspective 2: Balance is a collection of individual skills that must be learned and trained separately. This means that you will only get better at the specific balance exercise you train, and there is no transfer to other exercises. This perspective reflects the current state of the evidence.

Okay, maybe we just have to be a bit more versatile when performing exercises on an unstable surface. This way we would learn more “balance skills” and have a bigger transfer, right?

This idea is generally correct – this approach is called ‘Learning to learn.’ It’s about recognizing commonalities in different tasks. This effect has also been demonstrated in various studies in other contexts. But does it also apply to balance training?

The research on this is still quite thin, but Kramer and Giboin conducted a study on this and were unable to find this effect in balance exercises.

The following chart from the study shows the learning curves of people receiving specific balance exercises (that’s the blue line) and people without specific balance exercises, aka the control group in green.

As you can probably tell, the graphs are reaaally close to each other, which means – there was no difference between the groups. And no difference between the groups means that the “Learning to learn” approach does not seem to apply to balance training.

And then there is also the study by Kümmel et al. 2016 that comes to the same conclusion.

They attempted to keep the body position very similar while only changing the surface (for example performing a lunge on stable ground compared to unstable ground) and found that there is virtually no transfer of balance from unstable ground to balance on another surface.

They also tried to choose a similar surface and slightly modify the exercise – but again, there was no transfer.

From this, we can conclude that one only improves specifically in the exercise and on the surface where one trains.

Therefore, it is completely pointless to perform a single-leg stance or similar tests to determine how good your balance is, for example, in football, tennis, jogging, or anything else.

Nowadays, I actually get a bit emotional when I see people performing exercises on unstable surfaces – and I don’t mean that in a good way.

Let me be clear here: if you do unstable surface training, thinking that those exercises are “functional” then you are actually completely wasting time. Time you could use for much, much better exercises.

Why Balance Training on Unstable Surfaces Is Not Functional

There’s a really nice study by Hubbard in 2010 which brings this point home.

He concludes that training on unstable surfaces is LESS “functional” than on stable surfaces.

It’s because the muscle activation is quite different from the movements that you actually want to get better at. Also: since unstable surfaces are so … unstable … you can always just use a fraction of the weight you would normally use.

The result? Less strength gains, less stability gains, less muscle gains.

I want to give you the whole picture here, though. Some studies actually show greater core muscle activity when performing exercises on an unstable surface.

Well, if you take a closer look you notice that the weights used in these studies are ridiculously low, for example, in the paper by Norwood et al. 2007 they performed the bench press with 9 kg.

What’s funny is, that if you do basic exercises like deadlifts properly on a stable surface, you achieve much greater trunk activity than with specific core exercises performed on an unstable surface. This is shown, for example, in the paper by Nuzzo et al. 2008.

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Conclusion

Please don’t get me wrong here. If you ENJOY performing exercises on unstable surfaces and performance or injury risk reduction are not your main goal, then please, please go ahead and keep doing them! They definitely have their place.

It’s just that they don’t have the effect that people often say they do.

Of course, there are many more myths out there. You can learn about the 9 most common pain myths in this article.

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