Rock Solid Stability: Why You Need It and How to Get It

I use terms like stability, mobility, flexibility, and balance all the time in my podcast episodes and articles, but I rarely have the time to do a deep examination of each. So today, with the help of my special guest expert, I am going to rectify that. 

You don’t need to be a sports scientist or even an elite athlete for this to be meaningful stuff!

To help me in the endeavor, I have asked Yoga15’s Abi Carver back on the podcast (check out Abi’s other Get-Fit Guy episode about how you can use yoga to improve your athletic performance). Abi is the founder of and an instructor at Yoga 15, a two-time 200-Hour Yoga Alliance Certified Yoga Teacher, and a National Academy of Sports Medicine Certified Personal Trainer. So she knows a thing or two about how the body works. Which makes her the perfect person to explain stability and how it relates to the human body. 

What is stability?

"So, stability as it relates to the human body, from an anatomical perspective, is the ability to hold a position, but it's also the ability to control your movement through different movements and different positions," Abi said.

This seems simple and straight forward enough, but I think it gets a little muddled up with some of the other terms like mobility, and balance. So I asked Abi to set us straight on that.

"Stability and mobility typically refer to joints," she explained. "So, for each of our joints, we have a spectrum of available mobility and a spectrum of available stability. Stability, you can think of it as the strength of a joint. And mobility is the range of motion at that joint. So let's take the ankle, for instance, there's quite a lot of mobility at the ankle, you can circle your ankle, you can flex and extend your ankle. So there's not so much stability there as there is mobility, but if you take something like the lower back or the pelvis, there's much less range of motion or mobility there and much more stability. So each of the joints has an optimum range, both for mobility and for stability."

Stability is the strength of a joint. And mobility is the range of motion at that joint.

And then how does balance fit in?

"Well, balance to me is slightly separate because balance is essentially a much more complicated," Abi said. "It's not just to do with joints because it also relates to proprioception, which is your body's sense of where your body is in space. So, for instance, if you were going to challenge your balance by standing on one leg, not only...

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