"Core Stability" was all the rage not too long ago and to some extent, it still is. Unfortunately, so many people thought that doing thousands of crunches meant that you'd have a strong core. In my experience, this has gotten somewhat better lately, especially in organized athletics. There are a lot of good Strength and Conditioning Specialists (CSCS) that are taking a broad scoped and all incorporating approach to "core strength". Even the heavily marketed, but actually useful, P90X takes a pretty good shot. If you follow Tony Horton's 90 day program, you will definitely be stronger, leaner and more fit. However, I'm not sold on how actually stable the core is in so many of our athletes. Up until a few months ago, I likely would have said differently.
As I've mentioned before, I was fortunate enough to attend the PBATS Sports Medicine conference in January. One of many great presentations was given by PJ Mainville, Assistant Athletic Trainer with the Arizona Diamondbacks. He spoke on an integrated approach to rehabilitating shoulder injuries. A main topic of this integrated approach centered around Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization (DNS). Of all of the presentations during the three-day conference, DNS stood out to me as the most interesting. It is logical, applicable to a broad population and cutting-edge. A 20 minute lecture that briefly touched on DNS was enough to pique my interest. I've researched it a good bit and thought about its concepts even more. I'm excited to learn more about this approach because of its growing use in professional baseball and because it makes much more sense as "core stability".
I can do no justice to thoroughly explaining DNS here. I honestly don't have a strong enough grasp of the concepts and have never actually practiced it yet. Hopefully that will change soon though. In the meantime I'll do my best to give a brief summary and provide links to the information I've found.
DNS has been developed by Associate Professor Pavel Kolar, P.T., Paed. Dr., Ph.D. from the Prague School in Prague, Czech Republic. "DNS is designed to stimulate movement control centers in the brain in order to activate the body's "stabilizing system". This allows for improved body awareness, posture and respiration, improving the quality of specific and general exercises. DNS techniques stimulate the brain, which controls all muscles, and the muscles in turn move and protect all joints. DNS stabilizes the body by re-establishing the precise postures the child utilizes as it matures to crawl and upright itself in order to stand and walk. The method helps to restore the structural and postural alignment of the body's neuromuscular skeletal system by invoking a full body "global" motor pattern."
Basically, by placing patients in the postures of an infant learning to crawl, reach and walk, and initiating resisted movements from there, DNS stimulates the central nervous system to retrain the spinal stabilizing muscles. Every movement made by the head or an extremity is preceded by a group of muscles activating to provide a stable base. These muscles are the multifidi, deep neck flexors, diaphragm, muscles of the abdominal wall and muscles of the pelvic floor. The activation of these muscles is automatic and they act as a functional unit. Over time, the CNS takes over and the spine is stabilized subconsciously.
At PBATS, Mainville described it in a practical way that made a lot of sense. I'll try to do it justice here.
Imagine a basic, empty bottle of water. If you squeeze it on the sides, it's pretty easy to bend the bottle in half in any direction. Now, squeeze it by the top and bottom. The bottle is now much harder to bend. When the diaphragm and other muscles contract, your spine becomes like the water bottle squeezed by the top and bottom and is much more stable.
As we know, a lot of injuries are caused by disfunction or compensation. DNS is being used to not just rehabilitate but also in injury prevention.
There is so much more to this amazing concept. I hope you will take a look at the links and read some of the articles or watch the videos.
Here is the site for the Prague School: http://www.rehabps.com/REHABILITATION/Home.html From here you can follow the links to research articles, videos and power point presentations detailing the development and practice of DNS.
This is another site with some descriptions of DNS and testimonials from top professionals including Athletic Trainers. http://www.rehabfai.com/index.html
Steve Smith, of Athlete's Performance in Florida, wrote a guest post on mikereinold.com about it too. He has some good practical application of what he learned at one of Kolar's seminars. http://www.mikereinold.com/2009/05/dynamic-neuromuscular-stabilization.html
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