21st Century Core Training Part 2

Remember the days of sit ups? Oh, the memories.

The once staple exercise for the 'abs" is outdated and in it's place has come a new wave of core training.

In the 90's it was found that the deep core muscles were the one's that we should focus on but as the years went by it went to far and ended up with idiots standing on swissballs on 1 leg doing a single arm shoulder press while holding their first born with the other.

There are more ways to skin a cat and there are many ways to train the core. Instead of training the core with specific exercises in mind, train the core with specific functions in mind.

As mentioned in my last post, the most important function of the core is to stabilise the lumbar spine and to stabilise is to keep rigid. Basic exercises for this include prone, push up and side hold variations.

Before producing movement you must be able to resist it so enter anti rotation exercises, or the ability resist rotation. Anti Rotation exercises teach the core to stabilise the spine irrespective of any rotation or transverse forces coming through it. Exercises for this include pallof press, landmine and cable chop variations.

A lot of reason why core training is so popular these days is because of the increasing amount of lower back pain in the general population and especially, athletes. There are numerous reasons for lower back pain which I will detail in a future post but an important one is lumbar hyperextension. A lot of athlete's postures and movement patterns reinforce anterior pelvic tilt of which lumbar lordosis is a result of.

We can actually train anti extension too using exercises such as overhead medicine ball slams and roll out variations where our arms come above our heads but we must be able to resist going into lumbar hyperextension by squeezing our core, squeezing out glutes and re-training our motor patterns to stay out of that harmful range of motion.

Tomorrow I will hopefully post my latest video which will basically a montage of various core exercise variations form a prone hold position, a push position, a side hold position as well as pallof press/cable variations, roll variations, swissball variations, deadbug variations and full body exercises that all train various core functions.

Stay tuned and please leave a comment.