Why Care About Core Strength?

I spend a lot of time with my clients working on strengthening their cores. First of all, click here, to learn about what muscles the core consists of. I’ll give you a hint, the core encompasses more than just your ab muscles.

What Does a Strong and Healthy Core Do for You?

1. A Strong Core Performs and Controls Functional Movements

We use our core in almost every daily movement we do. It’s working when we stand up, sit down, walk, bend over or lift anything. Essentially, all body movements require engaging the core.

Core strength also ensures that many of our other muscles, including the quads, biceps, and pecs, are performing their duties. When I’m in the gym, I feel my core tightly engaged when I’m performing exercises that are focused on these other muscles groups, like squats, push-ups and even bicep curls. I’m constantly reminding my Personal Training clients to engage and think about their core when performing many strength exercises.

2. Core Strength Improves Posture

The core stabilizes our spine, and therefore, controls our posture. If you want a strong and proud, upright stance, you need good core strength. Strong abdominal, back and glutes muscles help hold you upright and keep your shoulders, back and chest open. They even help you hold you head properly on your neck.

3. A Strong Core Prevents Injury

The core is a complex system of many muscles working together to support and move the body fluidly and safely. Core strength stabilizes our entire body. Many of my Personal Training clients come to me with knee, low back, shoulder, or neck injuries. Issues and aches to these body parts can often be corrected with core strengthening exercises. This is why I spend a significant amount of time working with my clients on developing core strength.

3 of My Favourite Core Exercises

1. Rollout on Ab Wheel: This exercise is extremely tough to do properly and it does require some abs and arm strength to begin with. However, it’s an extremely effective exercise for you moderate and expert fitness goers out there! You can buy the ab wheel in most stores that sell fitness equipment, even Canadian Tire.

2. Growing Superman: This exercise is a great one for your back & glutes muscles. You want to try opening your arms and legs as wide as you can to increase the difficulty of this exercise.

3. Hollowman: To do this exercise properly, you again, need to have some ab strength but it you’re a beginner, try lifting your shoulders a few inches off the ground and keep your legs bent at a ninty degree angle while performing the exercise.

To Sum it up…

I spend a lot of time working to increase the core strength of my Personal Training clients. Because core strength controls so many of our daily movements, it improves posture and can help prevent injury, this is a key zone of the body to focus on strengthening. Try the exercises detailed above, to workout this important muscle cluster. I would love to hear from you on what your favourite core exercises are.