It’s time to straighten this out (literally).
Do you want to avoid being injured during workouts? Being well informed about this topic is essential to avoiding injury. There is so much confusion about what core strength and stability is, so I’m going to make it clearer.
Guide for core strength and stability:
1. Always work out with good posture
It doesn’t matter how strong your body is if your movements aren’t stabilised with good posture. Without good posture, the muscles in your body aren’t supporting each other and you will quickly have injuries.
2. Prioritise your Muscle workouts evenly
Muscles can be overworked or underworked, or even not work at all! Our main job is giving the body different tasks to map certain movements.
Let’s give you an example. Imagine Nouran Gohar, the world’s top female squash player. Her mission is hitting the ball at the right time with the right amount of energy and in the right place.
Let’s say that Gohar has not been conditioned too well recently. She’s getting tired in the larger muscle groups. We arrive at the last 5 minutes of the World tournament and her body is very tired! A wrong twist and the wrong support and suddenly she has a back injury or a pulled hamstring.
Thankfully Gobar knows the importance of working all your muscles to a high standard, ensuring that she plays extremely well and earning her the position of one of the top female squash players in the world.
Working your muscles evenly is very important to make sure that stronger areas of muscle don’t overcompensate and strain for weaker areas.
In the video below, I am discussing core strength & stability. Please watch and feel free to comment on this post or ask me questions directly about how you can use core strength and stability to improve your workouts.
You may be thinking… ‘I’m not a gym fanatic, does this still apply to me?’
It is still very relevant! Core strength and stability is not just for those who do a lot of sport. As I say in the video, it is pretty easy to pull our back muscles when we are hoovering at home, when we are lifting heavy boxes or even sitting at our desks at work!
Without strengthening our muscles they become weak and everyday chores become painful. The team and I here at ProTom fitness are here to help you avoid these situations and live a fulfilled life.
In this modern world, the fitness industry is focusing so much on core strength and working hard building dominant muscles we almost forget that without core stability all our efforts are partially wasted!
The solution? It is very simple. We need to push ourselves and challenge the whole body in different planes! You will find out more about this in my next video below where I show an Exercise example of a single-leg workout essential for core stability!
The exercise is called – Single leg swap under, overhead press hop.
I know the name is pretty long, however, the exercise is not too complicated and you will really feel the benefits of this workout.
All the teaching points are in the video which should hopefully be easy for you to follow. But I must mention something before I go… regarding the external rotation part of the second part on the sagittal plane view. I would like to mention again to keep the feet parallel!
External rotation indicates tightness at the bum muscles and very likely piriformis muscle. If these mentioned muscles are tight they will affect other muscle groups as well.
Attention to detail makes me a better trainer and helps me to get the results I want quickly and without injury. I hope you will follow this way of thinking.
If you have any questions regarding core strength and stability, click below!