Hierarchy of Movement: Stability
March 2025
March Madness. As defined by a 46 degree temperature swing in 10 days. The Fat Tire Birkie will once again face a challenge in providing a snow packed course for all of those studs (referring to tires). Good luck to all of those drafting responsibly on the hills of Hayward next Saturday. While weather pattern instability doesn’t have an easy solution, there is lots to be done about our core stability.
Stability is the next chapter in our Movement Literacy. Stated simply, stability is our anchor point. From that predictable and unwavering foundation, we can maintain posture and alignment, resist displacement from perturbations and control movement.
It is easy to see what happens when the foundation is soft and unstable. In the human tower, where is the foundation, exactly?
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Our foundation is the lumbopelvic-hip complex. Rotation, side bending, flexion and extension are controlled by at least 58 muscles and supported by ligaments. In addition to passive stability, ligaments have proprioceptors and mechanoreceptors to give us awareness of pain and where we are in space.
Example of image-based musculoskeletal model of the pelvis, hip and lumbosacral complex. Muscles are represented as red lines connecting origin and insertion points.
Di Martino, A., Geraci, G., Brunello, M. et al. Hip-spine relationship: clinical evidence and biomechanical issues. Arch Orthop Trauma Surg 144, 1821–1833 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00402-024-05227-3
From this stable foundation, transfer of forces between the upper and lower extremities during movement can happen with precision and power. You’ve likely witnessed riders who are grossly unstable, and you can literally see the wasted watts as they struggle to keep generating power in the sagittal plane. That’s not so say those riders can’t whoop on you. During Big Sugar in October, a (much younger) woman shared in our glorious pace line for a few miles. She was strong, but grossly unstable. Ultimately, she left the comfort of the draft and speed to her place on the age group podium. I can’t help but wonder if she could have been on pro podium had she not lost so many watts due to an unstable foundation? I also wonder how many more high torque revolutions she can generate with her knees and hips traveling outside of the sagittal plane without stress, strain and pain?
There are wildly successful athletes with unorthodox movement patterns. Hall of Fame legend Babe Ruth, NBA’s Joakim Noah, PGA’s Jim Furyk to list a few. I wouldn’t be so bold or presumptuous to say “better form” would improve their standings. With cycling, the number or repetitions per minute has a different impact than the number of pitches, basketball shot or golf swings in the same period of time. In addition, a cyclist’s body is constrained at points of contact: handlebars, saddle and pedals. Aberrant motions might have a bigger price to pay as they are constrained within those points of contact. Finally, watts are watts, and they only matter most when generated in the direction of the drivetrain. Why waste them?
Stability training is typically low hanging fruit for the cyclist: the smallest investment for the biggest gains. Beyond performance, stability is one key to injury prevention and recovery. Landmark studies in the late 90s by Hodges et al. looked at core activation in patients with and without low back pain, and discovered that local stabilizers (transversus abdominus and multifidi) were delayed in those with low back pain. 2004 study by my mentor, Dr. Thomas Best, at University of WI-Madison, showed that athletes recovering from acute hamstring strains returned to sport sooner with fewer recurrence of injury with stabilization exercises compared to stretching and strengthening (more to that study, but those are the cliff notes). Together, these studies suggest that the ability to initiate core stabilizers is at the very least, an important precursor to pain free, precise and powerful movement.
A stable foundation begins with core work. I am embarrassed (again) to say that I missed or misunderstood this concept in physical therapy school. 6-pack abs certainly have a role in stabilization, but they are not the main players. The “core four” are the diaphragm, transversus abdominus, multifidus and pelvic floor.
To understand core stabilization, it is helpful to envision the abdomen as a cylinder, with the diaphragm making up the ceiling, pelvic floor muscles at the base, and the front and back walls reinforced by the transversus abdominus (TrA) and multifidus, respectively. These muscles can be strengthened and programed through neuromuscular control to fire to increase intra-abdominal pressure and spinal stabilization during exercise. Imagine the muscles shortening to increase pressure inside the cylinder, preventing the soda can from collapsing. For those who aren’t soda oriented, Boyle’s Law, PV1= PV2, might be more helpful. At the core (pun), when volume decreases due to the walls of the cylinder contracting, pressure will increase.
The diaphragm is our primary breathing muscle, so it gets a free pass for assisting with stabilization during aerobic exercise. Halting ventilation to increase the pressure in the cylinder during cycling is ill advised, although may be incredibly helpful during strength training. There may be performance benefits to training with certain breathing techniques. Pursed lip breathing, nasal breathing, and inspiratory resistance training may all have a place in performance. I would refer you to the works of one of the greatest respiratory physiologists (and teachers) of all time, UW’s very own Dr. Jerry Dempsey (one of first to show that despite the lung being overbuilt, respiratory muscles could be a limiter in performance in male endurance cyclists).
Back to our discussion of the “core four”, leaving the diaphragm to do its thing, the TrA, multifidi and pelvic floor muscles provide an anchor from which to maintain posture and alignment, resist displacement from perturbations and control movement. Exercises named after creatures, such as dead bugs and bird dogs, target core stabilizers.
Beyond the core stabilizers, there are other global (more superficial) muscles referred to as movers. It may be helpful to categorize muscles by their role so as to be more intentional in exercise prescription: 1) anchor, 2) maintain spinal posture and alignment and resist displacement from perturbations, and 3) control limb movement. This categorization is something that I’ve found helpful, but is certainly not universally recognized or approved. The anchor, as noted above are the core stabilizers made up of the TrA, multifidi and pelvic floor muscles. Global stabilizers function to maintain alignment and resist perturbations include internal and external obliques, rectus abdominus, quadratus lumborum and erector spinae. Planks, side planks, superman and crunches are examples of exercises that target global stabilizers.
Finally, global mobilizers connect the pelvis to extremities for movement include iliopsoas, rectus femoris, and gluteal muscles. Bridges (double leg, progressing to single leg), single leg squats and lunges are good exercises for global mobilizers. The line between stability and strength exercises should be fuzzy. After all, the goal is to strengthen the stabilizers in order for them to provide an anchor to strengthen the muscles that put power through the pedal. Strengthening will be the final chapter of movement literacy.
