You may have heard dumbbell exercises are better than barbell ones because they work more of your “stabilizers,” or that free weights are better than machines for the same reason. But what are stabilizer muscles? And do you really need specific exercises to train them? It turns out there are a lot of misconceptions around this term, so let me set things straight.
What are stabilizer muscles?
This is going to get fuzzy, because there isn’t really agreement on what stabilizer muscles even are. This 2014 study searched the literature for mentions of stabilizer muscles and attempted to put together a definition. Here’s what they came up with: “muscles that contribute to joint stiffness by co-contraction and show an early onset of activation in response to perturbation via either a feed-forward or a feedback control mechanism.”
Okay, stabilizer muscles are muscles that, well, stabilize. Which muscles are those? That’s a harder question. A
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