Nashville Trainer Shows Why Core Fitness Is Important

Hey guess who?? Its your main man Rickey here, fresh off my blog hiatus. I want to talk to about core training a bit.

I know you’ve listened to the buzz around the fitness world or perused the latest workout books and probably heard the experts referencing core fitness in some shape or form. Traditionally, strength training has been dominated by exercises focused on isolating the muscles of the arms and legs. In fact, if you look at many of the weight machines that have become popular in gyms nowadays, you’ll notice that they require you to sit or recline while you use them.



While these machines will effectively help you build the muscles that they target, the problem is that in real life, we don’t use our muscles that way. We lift a box from the floor to a shelf, swing a golf club, push our children on the swing set, or climb a rock wall. As a matter of fact, the vast majority of the things we do require all of the muscles in our bodies to function together and be coordinated through our mid-sections, or our “core.”


While those activities may make the use of core muscles seem very obvious, this area, made up of the muscles of our midsection, are actually responsible for quite a few of the more subtle functions as well, including posture, balance and stability.


A weak core will often result in poor posture and stability, yet we don’t necessarily feel the results of it in areas that show us a direct cause and effect correlation. For example, poor posture, due to a weakened core, might allow our hips to slip out of alignment resulting in knee pain. In fact, quite a few of the chronic muscle and joint pain issues that a lot of us suffering with today stem from a weakened core.

Its no wonder, then, that exercise science has taken a dramatic shift in recent years to include the core in strength training regimes. That's why in my boot camps, rather than using a machine to first exercise your legs and then your arms, we do compound exercises that force the core to activate. By doing that, people are forced to transition the exercise movement through their core, and the core muscles in turn help to maintain good posture throughout the exercise. And not only that, but we also incorporate some intense ab training into every workout. It may be a static ab exercise like a variation of the plank or a dynamic ab exercise to assist in the transfer of power from the lower body to the upper body.
 The end result is that we are exercising in a fashion that mimics the movements that we use in everyday life, while creating better posture and increasing our stability and balance.

Cheers,

Rickey☮
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