Core Strengthening Exercises
Strengthening your core muscles has numerous benefits, allowing you to walk upright, maintain good posture, control your movement, and engage in daily work and sports activities. The core muscles are the foundation of movement for your entire body, stabilizing the spine, pelvis, and shoulder. A physical therapist can help you properly strengthen core muscles based upon the functional stability you need for various activities. Today, Mangiarelli Rehabilitation physical therapy assistant, Patti Ciferno, demonstrates core strengthening exercises you can do at home.
What are “Core” Muscles?
The core muscles are the foundation of movement for your entire body. Your core muscles anchor your center of gravity, extending the length of your torso including abdominal, back, and pelvic floor muscles. When your core muscles contract, they stabilize the spine, pelvis, and shoulder, creating a solid base of support from which you can stand, move, balance, and shift weight. The core muscles are your body’s natural stabilizers, making constant adjustments to maintain balance and make dynamic movements. The core links and transfers energy between your upper and lower body as you stand, walk, run, jump, and engage in daily activities and sports.
Your core muscles help you to function in a myriad of ways:
Transverse abdominis: the deepest of all abdominal muscles, it wraps around the spine and front of the abdomen and acts as a girdle of the internal organs. The transverse abdominis stabilizes the spine and pelvis.
Rectus abdominis: known as the abdominal muscle, it is comprised of two parallel muscles that run vertically on each side of the abdomen, from rib cage to pubic bone. The rectus abdominis helps your torso flex forward, stabilizes and controls the tilt of the pelvis, and plays a key role in breathing, labor, and elimination of the bladder and bowels.
Oblique muscles: both the external and the internal obliques are critical to bend, rotate, stabilize, and move the spine. The external obliques, which run on each side of the body’s trunk from lower ribs to pelvis, rotate your trunk and support spinal rotation, while the internal obliques help to flex the spinal column, bend sideways, and rotate the trunk.
Back muscles: back muscles, such as the erector spinae muscle group, stabilize your spine, keeping it upright and allowing it to extend and rotate. The erector spinae muscles extend along the entire length of the spine to the pelvis.
Pelvic floor muscles: these muscles are the base of the core muscles and work together with the abdominal and back muscles and the diaphragm to support the spine and control the pressure within the abdominal cavity. These muscles provide stability, improve reproductive health, and can prevent incontinence.
Diaphragm: the diaphragm aids in healthy breathing. This muscle sits below the lungs and rhythmically raises and lowers the ribs in response to the changes in the lungs, contracting as you inhale and relaxing as you exhale.
Why is Core Strengthening Important?
Strengthening your core has numerous benefits, allowing you to stand upright, walk, and control your movement. The core aids in transferring energy between the upper and lower body, shifting your weight, and moving dynamically in any direction. Your movement either originates in your core or your movement moves through the core of the body, such as transferring power from the legs through the core to throw a baseball with the arm. A strong core distributes the stress and decreases the load that comes from bearing weight on your joints and bones.
A strong core supports all your movement, from daily activities like showering and housework to job tasks involving lifting as well as sports activities like golfing tennis, biking, running, swimming, rowing, and baseball, all of which are powered by a strong core. A strong core is necessary for athletes as a weak core can lead to more fatigue, less endurance, and more injuries.
A strong core is essential for a healthy back. Building a strong core helps the core muscles effectively support your spine and body and maintain balance and good posture, which lessens wear and tear on the spine and helps you breathe deeply. A strong core helps to prevent falls and injuries and decreases the amount of time it takes to recover from injuries. A study of firefighters that focused on improving core and trunk strength and mobility for one year showed a 62% reduced lost time due to injuries and a 42% reduction in the total number of injuries.
Core Strengthening Exercises with Physical Therapy
A physical therapist can assess your core strength and design a core stabilization exercise program to enhance the strength, control, and endurance of your core muscles. Physical therapists help you properly strengthen core muscles based upon the functional stability you need for various activities. For example, a thirty-second plank trains the core to be stable during a high-intensity, short-duration activity while engaging in upper body strengthening while standing on a balance trainer works your core muscles for low-loading, longer duration activities. A plank, however, is an advanced core strengthening exercise that your therapist would help you to gradually achieve with proper training.
Today, our physical therapy assistant, Patti Ciferno, demonstrates several beginner core strengthening exercises you can do at home:
