What is CORE training?

What is core training?

Core training focuses on three areas: core mobility, core stability, and core strength.

Each of these plays an important role in the health, support, and function of your body, and so achieving a balance between them is vital. The starting point of this process lies in learning how to activate, strengthen, and control the muscles of your pelvic floor.

What is core mobility?

Refers to the movement of your spine and hips. There are five main patterns involved: isometric, flexion, extension, side flexion, and rotation. It is vital to mobilise your spine and hips before exercise, to loosen tight muscles and encourage weaker, under-used muscles to function correctly. This helps to balance the relationship between muscle length and movement patterns, and allows for deeper muscle activation, improving your core stability and strength. It is best to maintain a full, natural range of motion to keep your body functioning properly. Joints and muscles that are hypomobile (stiff) or hypermobile (too mobile) will inevitably lead to imbalances. When this happens, one area of the body is forced to compensate for the lack, or increased range, of movement in another – increasing your chances of injury.

What is core stability?

Core stability is the ability to control the position and movement of our mid-section (trunk), in order to improve your posture and improve the efficiency of your limb movement. Core-stability training targets the deep muscles of your abdomen, hips, and spine to create a base for support. The main deep muscles are the multifidus, traverse abdominis, and pelvis floor, which form a “cylinder” around the lower torso, with the traverse abdominis to the front, the multifidus to the back and the pelvic floor forming the base. During most types of body movement – lifting, bending, sitting, twisting, walking, running, or jumping – these three muscles work to stabilize your lumbar spine, while your gluteus and quadratus lumborum muscles work to stabilize your pelvis.

The stability of your back depends on all of these muscles being strong and working together effectively. Because of the complex network of muscles and fascia (connective tissue) involved in this structure, activating or “waking up” your core is a key part of training. You may find it hard to activate deeper core muscles to start with, so you should begin by following basic core activation exercises before moving into more complex core training work.

What is core strength?

Core strength is the ability to perform challenging physical tasks that demand good form and control. As it involves all of the muscles of the core – both deep and superficial – it has a key role in core training, but it is important to remember that good core strength requires a good foundation of core stability first. Core-strength training works by pushing your core muscles beyond the normal demands or by holding positions to increase endurance strength. The greater the force exerted upon the body, the greater the amount of core muscle engagement, and thus the degree of core activation and strength required. As you develop core strength through exercise, your movements will become adapted to a higher level of skill and performance.

Core training and the pelvic floor.

The pelvic floor is the group of muscles and fascia that form the base of your abdominal cylinder. The muscles and fascia have a number of functions – holding your pelvis together; maintaining the position of the pelvic organs and supporting them against gravity; and helping to control the flow of urine from your bladder and waste from your rectum. Poor physical fitness, as well as pregnancy, ageing, and injury, can cause a weakening of the muscles in this area, so it is important to keep them as strong as possible.

These muscles also play a key role in effective core strength because they help to activate the traverse abdominis, along with the others stabilising muscles of your core. It is therefore important to learn how to control and activate your pelvic floor muscles, possibly with Kegel exercises (the conscious contraction and engagement of your pelvic floor muscles) before attempting any other movements or core exercises.

Source: core strength training, DK.