Core Stability: The Misunderstood Foundation
Your core is the internal foundation that supports the rest of your body. Before it gets strong, it has to be stable.
Whenever someone starts Pilates, I like to be completely transparent and honest around what they are getting.
“Pilates is not the place where you are going to lose weight, nor are you going to build a six pack. You come to Pilates so that you can be strong and resilient to do activities and sports and be out of pain and do life. And then with this in place, you lose weight on your run and build a six pack in the kitchen. It’s part of a whole package.”
I believe in the modality and the science behind it. I believe in the anatomical basis of the exercises and how the deeper muscles get loaded as a priority over the global muscles.
As a movement methodology, my experience is that it has a lot to offer, and can help every body to some degree. But you have to be bought in and mentally committed too.
One of the main principles of Pilates is concentration. If you’re lying on the mat or reformer thinking about how many reps you can do and how hard you can brace your core for the next exercise, it won’t help your body in the same way. There is a mental and cognitive component to Pilates that is often just as challenging as the physical component.
The truth is, Pilates isn’t about bracing your core at all. It’s not about training the rectus abdominus (your six pack muscles on top). It’s about the deeper layers of muscle that form your core and offer stability to your spine. Pilates is for injury resiliency and overall functional mobility of the body. Pilates is so you can do life — whatever that means for you!
Our spine can move in four directions:
1. Rotation — twisting
2. Flexion — bending forward
3. Extension — bending backward
4. Lateral flexion — bending to the side
We spend much of our life naturally in flexion — even if we do not realize it. For example, when you are sitting in your chair and you slump forward slightly to look at your computer, you are in flexion. When you are walking along and put your head down, looking at your phone, you are in flexion. These are all different parts of our spine that we are flexing forward at any given time.
In contrast, we spend disproportionately less time in any of the other three spinal movements. Can you recall the last time you bent backwards? Rotated around at your body, instead of just in a rotating chair? None of the spinal movements alone are better or worse than the others — it’s not that flexion is bad or extension is good — but it’s desirable to have them all. In other words, we should be moving our spine in all four directions every day.
In addition to moving your spine, Pilates focuses on intrinsic, smaller muscles, instead of larger global muscles. When you go to the gym, much of the work is centred around your global muscles — quadriceps, glutes, biceps, hamstrings. But underneath, beside and around these global, superficial muscles, are many more layers of muscle that are like the glue that hold everything together. Many of these muscles are the foundation around which the larger muscles can function. But when was the last time you thought about strengthening your spinal rotatores? Or your multifidus and pelvic floor?
The term “core” gets thrown around regularly and freely. Some people use it to mean different components of the body than others, and some people don’t really know what it is at all. From a Pilates perspective, the core includes: multifidus, transverse abdominus, internal and external obliques, diaphragm and pelvic floor. Essentially, it is a connected group of muscles in the centre of your body, from which all else radiates.
These muscles play a big role in supporting your spine and pelvis and hence the role they play in reducing injury, improving posture, eliminating back pain and improving functionality and mobility of other muscles.
This is the concept of core stability: when you strengthen the deep core muscles (as above), they are able to stabilize the surrounding structures and hence act both proactively and reactively as you move your body and navigate through life. They are able to de-load structures that are overworked or muscles that are being recruited for the wrong job.
For example, if you are in a labour-intensive job, always having to lift and move heavy materials, and bending forward (flexion), your back absolutely has the muscles to do this. But eventually, when you use only your back muscles for this, they get tired, overworked, or inflamed and there is no back up crew to call in to help.
The back-up crew — or the primary working crew eventually — are the deep core muscles. If every time you lift a heavy object you think about engaging your deep core muscles, or if it is habitual enough for you that it happens automatically, you drastically reduce the load on your back muscles.
In the process, this reduces the inflammation and pain they are causing you. With these deeper core muscles activated, your back muscles can now work just for the flexion action, not to also support the rest of your body.
When you go to the gym and seek to “strengthen your core,” or are having “abs day” most people in this situation are referring to their intentions to strengthen their superficial abdominal muscles — rectus abdominus, or 6-pack. This in and of itself is not bad. In fact, it is good to challenge and strengthen all muscles and these are the prime movers in doing curl ups and many abdominal focused exercises.
However, these are not the ones we care about as much if you are in pain or seeking to increase the stability and injury resiliency of your body. This is for your deep core muscles. Pilates helps you strengthen these deeper levels of muscle, moving the attention away from just the global muscles that get lots of work in other gym activities.
When you show up at Pilates the work is in concentration and centring, allowing you to access these muscles so that in turn you can more effectively do . . . everything else.
You can think of it like building a house: you can have an amazingly beautiful house, but ultimately, if you did not lay a proper foundation eventually, the exterior and visible façade of the house won’t matter — it will start to fall apart.
Finding these deeper muscles and laying this foundation lets you do all your other desired activities more effectively and with less injury and facilitate movement of your spine in all four directions.
Spinal movement, decompression and stability is the very essence of our body. Our spine is in the centre, it has an impact on everything else that radiates out from it, both neutrally and muscularly. Without the proper work around core stability, strength, and awareness of intrinsic muscles, eventually many other things suffer. Start at your foundation, build from the inside out and your quality of life, movement ability and function will be better off for it.
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