Coach Zoe With this exercise equipment you can take your core strength to the next level. Great for at home workouts or the gym, beginners or athletes!
Why is exercise for core strength important?
What do you think of when you think of core? Is it your 6 pack abs? Or the obliques that you always hear referred to but never quite know where they are or what they do? Your core is actually the trunk of your body, from your shoulder girdle to your hip girdle. And in my opinion, your core is the most important part of your fitness. That’s because it is the foundation for your posture. Without good posture or even posture stability, injury and muscular balance will most likely follow.
Most exercise utilizes the core to some degree, unless it is an isolation movement. And even then it is hard (almost impossible) to truly isolate any single muscle at a time. But if you don’t intentionally exercise for core strength, it is easy to create poor habits and movement patterns. Which is how we eventually find muscular imbalances that misalign our posture.
How to build core strength
I tend to look at core strength with a corrective approach. That means I like to train in a way that corrects weak and/or overactive muscles within a dynamic range of motion. This type of exercise is typically considered functional training. Training in a way that uses multiple muscle groups in mechanically correct movement patterns that we use in everyday day life. For example, using a squatting motion to sit down. Or hinging like a deadlift to pick something off the ground. But corrective exercise goes beyond just squatting or deadlifting. It is exercise that exaggerates activation where necessary in the correct movement patterns.
My favorite example of this is an overhead squat. In a typical squat we should have a broad and open chest with our shoulders rolled back and down, not in a hunched and bent over posture. The overhead squat uses overhead force that calls you to focus on that upper body posture otherwise you will drop the weight and compromise form. Otherwise “fail” at the exercise.
So building the core goes beyond crunches, sit ups, and any other basic abdominal exercise you usually get in a typical core workout. When we strengthen the core we must incorporate the back, chest, and even our hip flexors and glutes! We also want to go beyond simple flexion and extension, we want to add rotation and stabilization however we can.
Stability ball for core exercises
A stability ball is the perfect piece of equipement for your core. The ball-shape provides a wide range of motion in your movement. Giving a large surface for stretches, dynamic or static. This characteristic also allows you to work in multiple planes of movement like forward, backwards, laterally, and rotationally.
As you can tell by its name, the stability ball is a unique tool that provides an unstable surface. You can improve your isometric endurance in your spine supporting muscle groups, like the transverse abdominis and erectors, and joint supporting muscles as well.
The stability ball also is a great tool if you workout at home. It can be stored easily and provides a variety of exercises. As opposed to most equipment that takes up space and is good for one thing. Most gyms have one available, and if not, deflate it and pack it into your gym bag! And anybody at any level can incorporate the stability ball to provide the same benefits while still getting a challenge because there are so many different ways to use it.
Functional stability ball workout to strengthen your core
I made a workout for my fit mamas of ANY fitness level (except my prenatal mamas). The goal is to correct upper body posture with a variety of full body exercises that TARGET the upper body, especially the shoulder girdle. So give it a try here, and let’s sweat!
