INTRODUCTION What’s The Big Buzz About the Ball? These days Yoga poses on your back , if you look around gyms, physical therapy clinics, and Pilates studios, you’ll most Yoga poses on your back likely see racks of stability balls in various sizes and shapes. Likewise, if you exercise at home, you’ve probably found the ball to be one of your favorite pieces of equipment. That’s because the stability ball delivers profound results and is easy to use, while also offering a good challenge to both beginners and advanced exercisers. People are completely changing their workout regimens with this user-friendly prop they do their ab workouts on the ball, lift weights on the ball, and practice yoga and Pilates on the ball! The ball’s effectiveness stems from its ability to naturally establish an awareness of your body’s imbalances, thus helping to improve and develop functionality and agility.
To translate that to lay terms: because you have to work to keep your balance while you’re on the ball, you end up strengthening weak muscles as well as all of your core muscles. In other words, let’s say you do a push-up while on the ball; you not only strengthen your triceps, pectorals, and back muscles as you would with a traditional push-up, but you also add in the extra stabilizing work, so your abs and lower back muscles, as well as all of your smaller supporting muscles get a workout. But there’s more! Anytime you change the way you perform an exercise, you force your muscles to work harder than they’re used to. So, once you put that push-up on the ball, your stronger muscles have to work harder than they usually do and your weaker muscles have to pull more of their own weight if you’ll forgive the pun.
