Your Core
Your core is at the center of everything you do, but do you treat it with the same respect? We often forget to workout or pay attention to these muscles despite their importance. Our Core is a group of muscles surrounding our hips, low back, pelvis, and abdomen. This is a lot of muscles. Without these muscles, we wouldn’t be able to walk, use our arms, or even function with ease. Not only does our core help us to function and move around, but it also helps prevent injuries. The core muscles help to maintain our spine in a neutral position, and prevent excess flexion, extension, or rotation of the spine, subsequently reducing risk for injuries.
Anatomy of the core
The core can be defined as the group of muscles that directly attaches to our spine, or pelvis. The core can be visualized in 6 parts: the front (abdominals), the back (paraspinals, glutes, latissimus), the sides (obliques, transversus abdominis, quadratus lumborum), the top (diaphragm), and the bottom (pelvic floor, and hip musculature). These muscles all work together to coordinate movement, maintain posture and balance, and protect your organs. These muscles additionally help to transfer load from the upper extremities to the lower extremities.
Engaging the deep core
The easiest way to engage your spinal stabilizers or deep core is to draw your belly button in towards your spine, tightening your abdominals. This movement is not so much a sucking in of your stomach, rather a bearing down of your abdominals. These are the same muscles you use when having a bowel movement. Once engaged, make sure to hold this position while still breathing. This will engage the deeper abdominal stabilizers such as the transversus abdominus, rotatores, semispinalis, and multifidus muscles. These smaller muscles are the primary supporters of the local rotational movements of the spine. When this group of muscles is weak, or not activating properly, it places the spine at increased risk for injuries such as disc herniation, arthritis, or ligament strain.
Strengthening the core
Now that we know how to engage our spinal stabilizers, it’s time to learn how to strengthen the larger muscles. Strength training can only happen once the smaller intrinsic, or deep core muscles are activated. It is easy to ignore these smaller muscles and compensate using the larger global stabilizing muscles, but without first stabilizing, you put yourself at increased risk for spinal injury. Core strengthening should focus on endurance based exercises, meaning holding for longer amounts of time (3 sets of 30+ seconds), or performing more repetitions (3 sets of 15+ repetitions). Strengthening only happens when muscles are worked to fatigue, so if the exercises are easy, or not tiring, you may need to alter the exercise. Here is a list of exercises that will help to strengthen the global stabilizing muscles.
Planks - Start on your hands and knees with your back flat, step both feet back until your knees are straight. Hold this position. There are many alternatives here, and you can opt to drop to you forearms, stay high on your hands, add leg lifts, or even leg jumps as shown above.
Side planks - Start on your side with your elbow underneath you, and lift your hips up off the ground. Hold this position.
Squats - Start with your feet shouler width apart. Keep your knees equal distance apart as you sit back as if you are sitting in a chair. Be sure to keep your back straight, and don't let your knees go over your toes.
Lunges - Step forward with one foot so that your legs are a few feet apart. Bend both knees until they come close to a 90 degree angle. Don't let your back knee hit the ground.
Bicycles - Laying on your back, bend both knees and pick them off the floor so your hips and knees are both at 90 degrees. Slowly lower one leg straight out, while keeping your low back flat against the floor. Bring the leg back, and repeat on the other side.
Bird dog - Starting on hands and knees, straighten one leg out behind you while reaching forward with the opposite hand. Return to the starting position, and repeat on the opposite side.
Pelvic tilts - Laying on your back, place your hands on your hips. Tilt your hips forward and backwards. Make sure you aren't compensating using your low back muscles. This movement should come straight from your hips.
Side lying hip abductors - Lay on your side with the bottom leg bent. Keeping your knee straight, lift the top leg towards the ceiling. Make sure you keep your body in a straight line when you are doing this exercise.
In this list, you don’t see crunches, or sit-ups because these muscles place the cervical and lumbar spine in excess flexion and may cause injury in a susceptible individual. Additionally, sit ups, and crunches focus on strengthening the rectus abdominis muscle in the front of the abdomen. While this muscle is important, it is a global stabilizer, and workout time may be better spent focused on the smaller local spine stabilizers in order to help protect against injury.
Core strength and injury
Whether you injured your back, elbow, or ankle, core exercises can help you recover faster and help to prevent the risk for reinjury of the body part. Again, the core is at the center of everything we do, if we are not able to stabilize at the core, excess load will be transferred to different parts of our body causing injury, or persistent pain.
More specifically - Low back injury
Strengthening with a low back injury can be perfectly safe when done properly. It is best to seek advice from a physical therapist before engaging in these exercises if you have, or had a back injury. Many low back pain cases stem from having a weak core, poor posture, or poor body awareness, and can be remedied through a tailored exercise plan. The goal for strengthening with low back pain is to improve the strength and quality of the muscles surrounding the injured muscles in order to off-load pressure and stabilize aberrant movements in that area.
Now that you have an idea of what your core is and does, its importance, and how to strengthen it, make sure to incorporate it into everything you do! Having a strong core, and the ability to stabilize your spine is a good foundation to injury prevention for your entire body. Contact your local PT to find out more about injury rehab and prevention.
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