Exercise of the Month: Bridge Pose or Pelvic Lift

Your core and your low back depend on a close relationship. Use a Pelvic Lift (also called Half Bridge) to traction your low back (which feels great!) and train your core to protect your spine.

1. Lie on your back with your knees bent, with a few inches between your knees and feet so they are lined up with your hip sockets.
2. Press your feet into the floor. Refer to the Engage Your Core Through Your Feet exercise to be sure that you are using the entire span of each foot.
3. As your footprints deepen into the floor, move your knees away from your face.
4. The focus is on pressing down and away so the lift comes as a natural result. Do not contract your buttocks to press up from below.
5. Hover or continue to lift up vertebra by vertebra into full bridge.
6. Come down slowly and consciously with the continued emphasis on pressing down into your feet, moving your knees away from from your torso, and keeping your tailbone lifted toward the ceiling until the very last moment when your weight is back on the ground.

Exercise of the Month: Engage Your Core Through Your Feet

Everyone knows that exercising your core is important, but finding the elusive core isn't easy. How do you know when you're strengthening your core or if you're working on something else? This simple exercise will show you if you are on target or missing the mark.

1. 1. Lie on your back with your knees bent and your feet comfortably close to your buttocks.
2. Push down through your feet to push yourself “up,” as if you were getting “taller.”
3. Push with your heels only and notice how the line of force travels up the back of your legs and hips. This is the chain of muscles that most people use most often, and it's not the core.
4. Push with the balls of your feet and notice how the line of force travels through the inside of your legs and up the front of your hips and spine. This is getting closer to the core.
5. Push equally with the balls of your feet and your heels. Notice how much is on the inside and how much is on the outside arches.
6. Push evenly with your heels and balls with 60% weight on the inside arch, 40% outside.
   

Now that you've found your core, notice how you can engage it through your feet in many activities. You can use your core in something as simple as sitting in a chair (notice where the weight is in your feet) or in various exercises like Pilates and weight-lifting. This is also the foundation to the Relax & Flow Undulation.

Exercise of the Month: Strengthen Your Neck Core Muscles

Head Turns
Stand at a wall with your knees bent. Feel your buttocks, upper back, shoulders, and back of your head on the wall. There should be a small space between the wall and your low back and also the back of your neck.

1. Lengthen the back of your neck and slightly tuck your chin so your face is not turned up nor down. This position alone may tax your neck core. If you feel the muscles in your neck working, stay in this position and breathe deeply for several breaths.
2. Once you feel comfortable in the position, add head turns. Turn only as far as you can without any twinges or pain in your neck.
3. Swivel your face to the right as the back of your head turns to the left. You will hear your hair sliding on the wall if the center of the movement comes from the center of your neck, which is what you want.
4. Turn both directions up to three times.
   

You can print this exercise and tape a copy to your bathroom mirror as a reminder. Notice how much better your neck feels and how your range of motion improves with just one minute of daily exercise. (It's pretty good for your thighs, too.)

This next exercise strengthens the neck core even more.

Neck Flexion
Lie on the floor with your knees bent and feet on the floor.

1. Put a finger at the base of your skull and lift your skull, but not the rest of your neck, off the floor about an eighth of an inch and rest back down gently. This movement is too tiny to show up on a photograph.
2. Remember that core movements are slow and small.
   
3. Feel down your neck for a bony bump, which is the back of a vertebra. Now lift this bump and the base of your skull, but not the rest of your neck, up just a tiny bit. Lift and release gently, slowly, just a fraction of an inch using each vertebra in your neck as the pivot point.
4. Don’t Do Any Movement That Hurts! You want to feel the muscles in the front of your neck doing the lifting, not the muscles in your chest or abdomen.

Core Muscles of the Neck

This is the third and final article in the series of core strength. As previously noted, the core isn’t limited to the abdomen, but each section of the body depends on active function of core muscles to work optimally. The neck’s unwieldy task of balancing a 10 pound head makes deep muscles vitally important in this fragile part of the body.

Most people feel tension in the superficial muscles of the neck. The trapezius and sternocleidomastoid muscles are common headache culprits. While the usual complaint is pain in the back of the neck, many of the core muscles are located in the front, such as the longus colli, longus capitus, and scalenes. When these muscles aren’t used, they become stiff and inflexible and the neck loses its ability to manage the weight of the head. (Imagine trying to balance a full one-gallon milk jug on a wooden dowel.)

Core muscles are small, so it is best to use small movements to strengthen them. In addition, their slow twitch muscle fibers contract and relax more slowly than other muscles. Keep this in mind when doing core exercises and be patient as these muscles develop.

Exercising the core muscles in your neck, shoulder, hips, spine, and torso will make all other movement easier and reduce your risk of injury. The core muscle exercises described in this series are easily done and won’t even cause a sweat. Devote time every week to keeping your core—and therefore your entire body—strong.

Core Muscles of the Shoulders

Previous articles in this series have described the core muscles of the torso and hips. We’ll continue with the shoulders and in the next cover the neck core.

What’s all the fuss over core muscles anyway? Your grandmother didn’t need a personal trainer to teach her about the core. Is this all some scheme to get us to sign up for exercise classes?

Your grandma knew how to use her core, because she built strength in her body with daily activities. Nowhere is this more evident than in her shoulders and arms. Imagine washing your laundry by hand and hanging it on the line to dry. Or scrubbing the floor on your hands and knees. Chances are your grandma walked farther and carried more than men do today. Those simple activities develop strength in the core. Today’s pastimes, watching TV, loading the dishwasher and working on the computer, bypass the core.

Take the current sedentary lifestyle, add our fascination with speed and pretty muscles, and the result is a modern epidemic of core weakness. So let’s put things in reverse and find the core muscles of your shoulders.

Raise one arm in front of you and continue to lift it up -— as long as it doesn’t hurt anywhere -— until your arm comes alongside your ear. Do it again -— but this time take more than ten seconds to lift your arm and another ten seconds to lower it. As before, don’t do any movement that causes you pain.

Moving slowly requires the use of the core, so if it felt substantially different the second, slower time, then using the core of your shoulder isn’t a habit. By the way, you can slow down any movement to improve your use of the core. Try walking by taking one step every second to feel more of your torso and hip core.

The core of the shoulder includes two sets of muscles, those that keep the shoulder blade in proper position (most importantly the serratus anterior, trapezius and rhomboids) and those that stabilize the arm bone in the shoulder socket (the rotator cuff: supraspinitus, infraspinitus, teres minor, and subscapularis).

Here are some exercises that will help you strengthen both sets of the shoulder core.

Core Muscles of the Hips

Core muscles are the new focus in the fitness industry. They protect the low back. Pilates strengthens the core. Advertisements promise a strong, sexy core if we buy their products. The problem is that the core can be illusive for the average person to find. That’s because the body has more than one core.

The Hellerwork Client Handbook compares the core to the inside of an apple. Core muscles are deep inside the body, right next to the bones. These muscles have more leverage and, when working properly, also stabilize the skeleton. When the core does not stabilize, joints are more prone to injury, the body is weaker, and other muscles get confused about what to do.

All muscle groups have superficial muscles and core muscles. Let’s delve into the core of the torso and core of the hips. Follow up articles will explain the core of the shoulders and the core of the neck.

The core of the torso is like a cylinder around your midsection, comprised of four muscle groups: the pelvic floor, transverse abdominus, multifidi, and diaphragm. The pelvic floor (actually a group of six muscles) creates the bottom of the cylinder. The transverse abdominus encompasses most of circumference as a girdle around the belly. The multifidi fibers, one to four inches long, fan out deep within the superstructure of the spine. The diaphragm caps the core; each breath turns this cylinder to an ever-changing, dynamic powerhouse.

When all parts of your torso core are strong and work together, you can lift more, bend over more, and do all kinds of movement with less risk of injury. The torso core is also an important base of support for your legs, arms, and neck.

The hip flexors lift your legs. If you rely on the rectus femoris, tensor fascia lata, and sartorius, you will be weaker and in less balance than if you use the core hip flexors, the psoas and iliacus, sometimes called the iliopsoas. These core muscles attach to the front and sides of the lumbar spine and deep inside the pelvic bowl. They have more leverage and bulk than the superficial muscles, but they also depend on stabilization from the torso core to work.

How do you know when you are accessing the deep hip flexors? One clue is that your pelvis does not rotate. Sitting in a chair, lift one leg. Does your low back shift or your hip lift up? If so, your iliacus and psoas are cheating and your low back is taking the brunt of the movement.

If you can hold your pelvis perfectly still and lift a leg, your torso and hip core are both getting stronger. It’s what makes a karate front kick so powerful. Even more challenging and strengthening is lifting both thighs with a stable pelvis, the action in the Pilates Teaser and yoga’s full boat pose (Navasana).

I gave readers an Easy Core Exercise in my previous post, Balance Between Abdominals and Back Muscles. Another way to wake up the core is with the Relax and Flow undulation. In both cases, the exercises use small, slow movements since the core is comprised of slow twitch muscle fibers. If you can do these exercises with complete pelvic stabilization, then you will be ready to take on more intermediate core exercises.

Balance Between Abdominal and Back Muscles

I confused a client yesterday by saying that her core muscles were stronger than most peoples, but then also telling her that her core was weak. Say what?

She was quite athletic with strong muscles throughout her body. The problem was that her core muscles weren’t as strong as her abdominal muscles. This imbalance was a source of her low back pain.

Core muscles stabilize the skeleton and give leverage to other muscles. Using superficial muscles like the rectus abdominus, pectoralis major, latissimus dorsi, quadriceps, and gluteus maximus without participation from the core will pull the skeleton out of alignment and create injury to ligaments and spinal discs.

“Is Your Ab Workout Hurting Your Back” by Tami Parker-Pope, published in the New York Times June 17, 2009 gives a great explanation and a video with some good exercises.

I agree that the exercises in the video are good for the core, but what is the core? I wrote about that previously in the article entitled “Core Exercise” with an easy exercise called Engage Your Core Through Your Feet to help you find those illusive core muscles: the pelvic floor, transverse abdominus, and multifidi. Finding the correct muscles is after all the first step in using them.

Here is another very simple (that doesn’t mean easy) exercise where you use the core to stabilize your low back, which is its real function, as you lift your legs. It also engages the core hip flexors, the psoas and iliacus muscles, but that's a different article.

Easy Core Exercise
1. Lie on your back with your knees bent and your arms at your sides.
2. Tilt your pubic bone up toward your chin and then your tailbone back. Go back and forth a few times and find the middle. Is your sacrum on the floor? If so, you have equal range of hip flexion and extension.
3. Adjust if necessary so that your sacrum is firmly on the floor.
4. Do not let your sacrum or hips move off the floor (this is the key) and lift your left leg so that your knee comes toward your chin, only as far as you can without moving your sacrum.
5. Press the opposite foot into the floor (use what you learned from the Engage Your Feet by Using Your Core exercise) if needed to stabilize.
6. Repeat with the right leg.