IMPROVE YOUR CORE…. WITHOUT WORKING OUT!

24 Jul 2014

Tags: bootcamp brisbane, bootcamp melbourne, bootcamp sydney, health, injury prevention, strength,

Have you been attending your training sessions religiously but still feel as though your core is weak or not activating as well as it could?

Do you feel as though your core strength is holding you back from reaching your strength and fitness goals? Or is your weak core preventing you from recovering from a back injury? Well… if you answered yes to any of the above I have some great information for you in this months article!

Professor Bernadette Murphy and her team at the University of Auckland conducted a great study in 2006 where they measured in a group of healthy, asymptomatic young men their ability to activate their deep abdominal muscles when they raised their arms over their head. In a healthy state these muscles should receive information from the brain before the arms are lifted in order to engage and stabilise the trunk so that we can maintain our balance during this action. This should happen without us having to think about engaging this muscle group and should happen very quickly. In the study around 20% of the young men could not activate these muscles before raising their arms thus making them less stable and more prone to injury. These men were re-tested after 6 months and found that they still could not activate these very important muscles, which suggests this ‘de-activation’ is not something that the body is able to self correct over time.

Now here comes the really interesting part of the study, when assessed all of these young men were found to have restriction and tightness of the sacroiliac joints in their pelvis. When the men were given a single session of Chiropractic adjustments these joints resulted in close to 40% improvement in the men’s ability to pre-activate these muscles! This suggests that by improving the function of the sacroiliac joints, we can improve the connection between the brain and the deep abdominal core muscles!

These findings are so important for anyone wanting to improve core strength and stability, reduce their chance of injury, optimise results of their work-outs and improve their ability to perform everyday activities of living. How many people do you know could benefit from this? The answer is EVERYONE!

This article was written by Dr. Erin Hawken. Dr. Hawken is a Chiropractor and practices at Chirosports in Coogee, NSW.