What are your core muscles?
Why is a strong core so important?
How do you know if you’re using your core muscles correctly?
How often should you be training your core?
Where should you start?
What are your core muscles:
Your “core” includes all the muscles (front and back of the body) from your sternum to your sacrum (tailbone):
- Abdominals
- Pelvic floor
- Glutes
- Hips
- Middle & Lower back
Some refer to the core muscles as any muscles within the abdominals and back of the body that attach to the spine or pelvis.
We can divide the core muscles into 2 groups:
- Stabilisers: These are generally our smaller deep underlying muscles that provide stability for movement.
- Movers: These are generally our larger superficial muscles responsible for the movement.
These muscles form the central part of your body and need to work in harmony to provide good balance, stability and alignment for all movement.
Why is a strong core so important:
Core strength is extremely important:
- Allows us to maintain good posture.
- Gives us stability and balance throughout movement.
- Provides protection for our organs.
- Helps to minimise the risk of lower back pain as well as other muscular skeletal injuries eg. strains and sprains.
- Provides an increased efficiency in all movement, even daily tasks like getting up from a chair or picking something up off the floor.
- Assists endurance and offsets fatigue.
- Improves athletic performance.
- If our core is weak, our movements are less supported which means other muscles of our body must compensate.
- Allows your body to transfer force and stress through your muscles rather than your spine.
Weak core muscles can leave you with poor posture, lower back pain and prone to injury.
How do you know if you’re engaging your core muscles:
“Engaging”, “bracing” or “activating” your core means that you’re tightening all your core muscles so that your midsection should feel like a strong, stable cylinder.
Activation exercise:
- Sit or stand as tall as possible.
- Relax your shoulders away from your ears (make your neck longer).
- Squeeze your shoulder blades together at the back and draw them down and in toward your tailbone.
- Draw your belly button in to your spine.
- Think about making your waist as narrow as possible and your belly as flat as possible.
- Lift your pelvic floor up (refer to video for specific exercises).
- Tuck your tailbone under and squeeze your butt cheeks.
- Slightly rotate your knees outward.
Often people are great at engaging their large “mover” core muscles, however have difficulty engaging their deep stabilizing muscles. This is what you should focus training before anything else.
How often should you be training your core:
Ideally every day!
Our stabilising core muscles are designed to work all day, every day as they keep us upright, in good alignment and allow us to move.
This doesn’t mean a 1/2 hour gruelling ab session at the gym, it means sprinkling a few simple exercises throughout your day and absorbing them into your normal routine.
- 1 min activation exercise (detailed above) when you’re driving, cleaning your teeth, sitting at a desk, waiting for the kettle to boil, before you start reading your book at night…. anything that you do religiously every day, tack it onto that and make it a habit.
- 1 min specific pelvic floor exercises (I’ll cover this specifically in my next blog)
Aim for a minimum 2 x 5 min core workouts a week – making your way to 3-4 x 10min workouts.
5 mins a day:
Start with absolute basics and focus on activating your deep stabilsing Transverse Abdominus muscles (refer to video). Try a combination of these exercises:
Once you feel strong and confident with these exercises you may like to try a more advanced working using both stabilising and mover core muscles:
Bonus Tips:
- Anything that provides instability eg. a BOSU ball, standing on one foot etc. will encourage the use of your core muscles to maintain balance.
- Make core exercises a part of your warm up or cool down routine that you do before every single workout.
- Daily habits – do your basic T/A activation exercise in conjunction with your daily habits mentioned above.
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