Perturbation work is making a comeback! It seems like my biggest fan Jim Reeves, the go to guy in the Toronto area, is sharing his insight to how to train the anterior core with his collection of bosu and Swiss ball exercises! While I have not read his article, it is likely to be prone exercises like bridges or the typical swiss or medball slaps kneeling or standing.
…I was watching my friend Matt Delaney coach an olympic lifter and he was working on core strength with various skill work with the olympic lifts. The work was skilled, specific, and used forces that will transfer. This is the basic fundamental argument with the chops is that they don’t use forces that will handle 3200 watts of hip power of a running back and only work by making them skilled choppers. While I think the exercises can be placed in a program, their lack of quantification is another testament of marketing gone wild.
Man do I grow tired of seeing this type of hype marketing madness. I live in a world of BOSU’s and Swiss balls and pertubations. So we’re training sprinters to react…except there is not enough time to react as sprint running involves ground contact times that are too short to rely on reaction. May be alright for a rugby/football/soccer (football to you Europeans)player of sub-elite ability although they would still be better advised to invest most of their training time to being proactive about generating force/impulse in the legs or core or head or arms or fingers or toes etc.
However, a bit of pertubations work including “jump and stick” may enhance short term neural sensitivity and therefore could be ideally placed close to competition or somewhere in a program before maximal output work (recent anecdotal evidence 2009).