CORE TRAINING ANATOMY AND EXERCISE

What is core anatomy?

Core anatomy refers to the body minus the legs and arms. The major muscles involved in these core areas include the muscles of the belly, mid and lower back (external and internal obliques, tranversus abdominus, rectus abdominis, multifidus, erector spinae (sacrospinalis), longissimus thoracis, and the diaphragm. The minor muscles are distributed peripherally and include latissimus dorsi, gluteus maximus, medius and minimus and trapezius.

What are the functions of the core?

The core has the function of stabilizing the thoracic cage and the pelvis during dynamic movements. An efficient core helps to maintain a normal length-tension relationship between the muscles of the core, maintains normal muscle force coupling and optimizes arthrokinematics. It also ensures optimal efficiency of the entire kinetic chain during movements, giving dynamic stabilization to acceleration and deceleration and proximal stability to movements of the extremities as well.

It is also involved in providing internal pressure in the expulsion of substances from the abdominal cavity (passage of feces, air, and vomiting). Women employ the core muscles for labor and delivery (especially the tranversus abdominus). A weak core musculature of the pelvic region can result in either urinary or fecal incontinence or both. In summary, the core muscles are needed for:-

•  Pushing
•  Lifting 
•   Excretion
•  Birthing

The core is involved in most full-body functional movements, especially in sporting activities and it determines to a large extent, a person’s posture. The core muscles align the pelvis, spine and ribs of an individual to resist a specific force, static or dynamic.

What are the aims of core muscle training exercise?

The aims of core muscle training should include:-

• Spinal stabilization to ensure proper coordination and control of the spine and effectively utilize or restore strength, power, neuromuscular control and endurance of the major core muscles to control and protect the spine from injury.
• Facilitate and balance muscular functioning of the entire kinetic chain.
•  Enhance neuromuscular control and increase neuromuscular efficiency throughout the entire body and provide a more efficient body positioning during sporting activities and at rest.

Guidelines for Exercise Selection

The exercises should be such that will be safe, challenging, proprioceptively rich, ensure stress in multiple planes, be activity specific, incorporate multi-sensory environment and be progressively functional and continuous (i.e. slow to fast, simple to complex, low force to high force, static to dynamic, known to unknown etc)

Exercises:-

There are various types of exercises designed to train the core muscles and guidelines for selecting some of them has been given above. These exercises may include:-

1.  The McGill stability exercises
2.  Pilates exercises
3.  Swiss ball program
4.  Balance board
5.  Shoe training program

and many more. For the abdominal muscles like rectus abdominis, internal and external obliques, they can be trained using the abdominal hollowing technique. This involves the athlete lying on his or her back in the neutral position, he/she is instructed to relax the muscles of the abdomen, bend the knees and while slowly exhaling, pull the lower abdomen inwards as if trying to push the belly button (umbilicus) towards the floor. This is a common exercise known as zipping-up maneuver. This technique can be combined with other exercises involving the lower extremities like straight leg lifts and knee to chest exercises. The athlete must always remember to begin with the abdominal hollowing technique before adding limb movements exercises.

It is to be noted that abdominal exercises are an important part of any core training program, for example, it forms a major part of coordination and control exercises that are designed to help the body proprioceptive systems coordinate muscle control to prevent injury during movements or when colliding into external forces as is the case in some sports (e.g.rughy).

Author: Ola Suyee