What Muscles Does Slacklining Work?

Slacklining is a great activity because it balances (no pun intended) and tests a number of your muscles and skills so that you improve each one with experience. As you increase your slacklining experience, you may see a number of benefits because it’s an activity that works many different parts of your body both physical and mental.

Slacklining works several muscles significantly incorporating core muscles and working the abdominals, glutes, quadriceps and back muscles. It also helps to stabilize your hips and spine. Slacklining is effectively a full body workout that requires balance, coordination, core strength, and good posture for optimal success.

And even though the brain is an organ and not a muscle per se, you’ll work that, too. Slacklining requires concentration and patience and the more you practice both, the better you’ll be at slacklining and possibly other life activities that utilize both traits.

Let’s take a closer look at the muscles worked when slacklining.

What Muscles Does Slacklining Work?

Muscle Activation

Muscle activation is a big part of sports like weightlifting because it involves contracting and relaxing them to increase size. You’ll often hear weightlifters referring to focusing on exercises that activate the biggest and most muscles when choosing weight exercises. That’s why they focus on heavy lifting exercises like squats, deadlifts, and bench press that activate your largest leg and chest muscles.

For slackliners, muscles – particularly leg muscles – are heavily activated which can positively impact not only your fitness but can be successfully used in rehab, too. More on that below. While you won’t build big muscles by slacklining the more muscles you activate the more you improve the flexibility of that muscle.

This is backed up by research which shows that slacklining provides significant increases in activation and recruitment of the quadriceps which is a positive outcome for anyone who has muscle movement that is inhibited for whatever reason.

While slacklining works these muscles, it also works a few skills and personal traits as well that you’ll get to challenge and improve upon.

Balance

Improving your balance may be achieved by developing your core muscles along with your legs, back, shoulders and arm muscles. A good sense of balance also relies on a healthy relationship with your ears and head as they both impact your equilibrium and ability to keep yourself balanced.

Slacklining involves balancing yourself on a thin flat cord (the slackline) that is typically 2″ in width (beginners) or 1″ in width (advanced). As you can imagine balance is an important aspect of slacklining given the thin area you have to balance yourself upon.

While your first few attempts on a slackline may be unsuccessful and frustrating depending on your current level of balance, you can improve quickly with practice. As you become familiar with the slackline and learn to improve your balance, you will also improve your concentration and focus so that you are able to successfully traverse the complete slackline over time.

Posture

Having a straight, upright posture works your core stability muscles including your abdomen, back and pelvis. Slacklining is performed best when you keep your chest up and have your hands out to your sides to balance yourself especially when you’re a beginner. Your knees should be slightly bent and your eyes should be focused not down at your feet but rather towards the end of the slackline. Stand with your feet parallel to the slackline webbing. The key is flexibility rather than being stiff and rigid. You’ll find your own best stance over time.

The ideal posture for a human involves your upper and lower back being straight and your hips in alignment with your shoulders and knees. To confirm your posture, pull your shoulders and head back, ensure you have a flat spine and chest flush with the abdomen.

As you progress with slacklining, you will improve your muscle memory and will become more comfortable and find out what works for you specifically.

Concentration

Slacklining involves a good level of concentration. You’ll find this out quickly if you’re unable to balance on the slackline the first few (or more) times you try. This is natural and to be expected. While slacklining is not easy to master, you will get better as you practice so the key is to focus and not give up.

Balancing and walking along the slackline is not as hard as it looks once you’ve tried it several times and begin to get familiar with the slackness of the line and the skills involved.

Brain Work

Like we mentioned earlier, your brain is an organ not a muscle but slacklining is going to give it a workout, too. A 2010 study of both slackliners and dancers studied the human hippocampus which is responsible for tasks like memory and learning in the brain. The research found that slacklining assists with both the memory and learning functions.

So when you add up the concentration, focus, memory and learning benefits from slacklining, it’s easy to see how your brain is also getting a workout even if you don’t realize it at the time. Which is awesome because when you’re doing something athletic and fun, the last thing you’re thinking about is thinking, right?

Injury Prevention

Slacklining isn’t without its dangers. As with any physical activity, you can get hurt. As a beginner, you shouldn’t be attempting a slackline that is more than perhaps 20″ (50cm) off the ground. That way when you lose your balance and fall off – and you will fall off – you land on your feet.

Professional athletes such as gymnasts require balance to compete but other pros such as basketball, hockey, baseball, rugby and football players often do balancing exercises to improve not only their skill at their sport but to decrease the chance of injury, too.

Having said that, slacklining when done safely can help you prevent future injuries when you consider the improvement in balance you can achieve. Research has shown a decrease in ankle injuries with improved balance and slacklining certainly offers the opportunity to improve yours.

Rehab

We just spoke about how slacklining works different muscles and also incorporates your ability to balance yourself. It makes sense then that rehabilitation services would utilize slacklining to help people rehab injuries. Physiotherapists, chiropractors and other medical professionals have thus incorporated slacklining into their services.

To wit, here is the conclusion from a 2013 research report titled Slacklining for Lower Extremity Rehabilitation and Injury Prevention regarding the use of slacklining as a rehab choice:

Slacklining represents a novel rehabilitation and training method that can be readily incorporated into existing programs.

Academia.edu

Conclusion

Slacklining works a number of core muscles and also incorporates your abs, glutes, quadriceps and back. Slacklining also utilizes and improves upon your sense of balance and requires a good level of concentration and focus which studies have shown can improve your learning and memory functions.

Research has also shown that rehab services can help their patients achieve recovery benefits when incorporating slacklining into their services which helps to illustrate the many benefits both physical and mental that slacklining offers.