Balance and stability are fundamental skills that are necessary for almost every physical activity, including volleyball. Balance is defined as being able to maintain your body’s center of mass, over its base of support. Stability is the body’s ability to generate force in different places and to differing degrees, in order to propel itself into or closer to perfect balance. When you lose balance and then start to fall, but are able to recover before you do, that is stability. Since all movement and force produced by the body comes by way of your muscles, athletes can train to improve stability and develop a better ability to maintain and regain balance.
Understanding Base of Support and Center of Mass
Base of support is the part of the body that contacts a supporting surface (ex. floor) and the area within (space between both feet). Think of the center of mass as the center most spot of the body. Picture the image of a person facing you and divide them perfectly into left and right halves from top to bottom, now turn them sideways and do the same thing creating front and back halves, lastly divide them into top and bottom halves. The spot where all 3 of these lines would intersect is the center of mass.
If you stand on one leg your foot would be your base of support and your center of mass
would, for the most part, be right over it. If you started wobbling and your upper body swayed really far to the side, you would have failed to maintain your center of mass over your base of support, meaning that you’ve lost your balance.
Here are 3 main components to improve stability and maintain balance:
Flexibility
When a muscle is “tight”, it limits movement. When an athlete is flexible, he/she is comfortable with more movement. Muscles have an ideal length, at which they’re able to exert the maximum amount of force. When a muscle is too tight (shortened) or when it’s too loose (lengthened), that decreases its ability to generate force. Since muscles need to produce force to return an off balance body closer to a balanced position, having too tight or too loose muscles can be problematic to stability and balance.
Muscles work in opposites, like the quads (front of thigh) and hamstrings (back of thigh), for example. When the quads contract and shorten, the hamstrings relax and lengthen, and vice versa. So if the quads get tight, the hamstrings become lengthened and both become less efficient when it comes to force production. A general rule of thumb is that you want to stretch the muscles you work, whether that’s after a practice, a tournament or any training session. Take a look at the usual suspects: hip flexors, quads, and calves that tend to be tight after a typical volleyball practice.
Muscle Strengthening/Activation
Muscles help us maintain and regain our balance, so it’s important to strengthen them. When you lose balance, a variety of muscles contract and relax in different sequences in an attempt to prevent you from becoming further off balance and return you to where you were. Imagine all of the different muscles are players on a team. Each player has their role, and when they do their job well, the team performs well. But , for example, if the hitters keep making errors even if the pass and set are accurate, the team will lose the game. Therefore, we want our muscles strong enough to be able to do their job. A good training program will help to strengthen all of the muscles that contribute to stability.
In addition, certain muscles need to be stimulated in order to help them work efficiently. After a muscle has been lengthened for a long period of time, even if you lengthen the opposing muscle that was shortened, it will still function the way it had been functioning prior. Stimulating this muscle will help it to start working properly and then strengthening it will make it more resistant to lengthening by way of the opposing muscle getting tight. The idea here is that if you determine a muscle or muscle group to be tight, and then you lengthened it, you would activate and strengthen the muscle(s) in opposition to it. So if you lengthen the quads you would activate/strengthen the hamstrings (Gif: Stiff Leg Deadlift), If you lengthen the hip flexors you would activate/strengthen the glutes and so on.
Motor Learning
Now it’s time to apply the flexibility and strength to your game. That’s where Motor Learning comes in. Motor learning is when your nervous system receives information from the activities you do and then adapts to be able to do it more efficiently. If an athlete continues to train proper passing technique, it starts to become routine and the athlete becomes a better passer. Stability training works the same way.
When doing a balance exercise that challenges your stability, your body gets to learn and become more adept at maintaining balance. The muscles that you’ve returned to their proper length and activity will function properly and can contribute to the learning. It is similar to challenging your body when it comes to strength training by continuing to add weight when the current weight starts to get easier. You can challenge your body’s balance by decreasing the amount of stability as you improve. Passing while standing with two feet on the solid ground is quite stable, passing on one leg on solid ground is a lot less stable. It’s even less stable to pass with both feet on an unstable surface like a half ball or balance disc, and even more difficult to stand with just one leg on an unstable surface. passing form- 2 leg
Using your understanding of what balance looks like, you can apply these concepts to challenge stability with many other exercises. For a guideline, you definitely don’t want to fall over, but you want to be pushed far enough away from your balanced position that it isn’t easy to rebalance. Once the current activity become easy and you cease to lose balance, make it more unstable.
Balance is essential in everything related physical performance on the volleyball court. The various muscles in your body work to maintain and regain balance, but those muscles can be inhibited, decreasing their ability to do so. Proper flexibility and proper strengthening can help return them to functionality. Once everything is in order, you can challenge those muscles with specific balance exercises. Your body can then adapt, and as you become better at performing those exercises, your overall stability increases. As your stability increases, you’ll be better at maintaining balance as you navigate both life and sports.
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About the Author
David has been a Sports Performance Specialist at Trademark Performance in Northwest Indiana since 2014. He specializes in training programs for volleyball athletes, most of which come to him seeking an increase in their vertical. Contact David at dhardy@trademarkpc.com. Learn more about David here.
