06 Jun Using your core effectively
Patients often used to say “Am I straight?” and often Sally will say “Yes, but you’re rigid”.
If you can learn to use your core more effectively, you won’t need to use so many muscles to hold your spine together each and every day as your core muscles are designed to work all day, every day. Your movement muscles on the outside are NOT designed to hold us together all day, so when we use these muscles incorrectly, we find that our bodies become tired very quickly and everything we do seems like a struggle. We end up having a “tug of war” with ourselves as we try to use our outside muscles to hold us together and to move. This is why many rugby players “pull a hamstring” in a game.
Although they may have big, strong hamstring muscles from training a few times a week or at the gym, if their core muscles aren’t working properly, they may end up using their hamstrings to hold them stable and then at the same time try to use their hamstrings to take off and run, so this is like trying to have a “tug of war” with yourself.
They have big, strong muscles, but they’re trying to use the same muscle for two opposite functions. The end result is that they “pull a hammy”. What should have happened is that they should have used their inner core muscles to hold themselves together and their hamstrings to move.
One very noticable way of telling if your core is engaged is check your shoulders. Are they often tense in day to day activities. They shouldn’t be – when Sally is giving PhysioFusion™ classes we will often hear
“ribs in, breathe with your lats, shoulders relaxed.”
You probably will not get this technique in the first lesson – in fact you may think this is weird, however with the Pilates style classes you learn to correct yourself and quite ofter over a few weeks your injuries are dissappearing and you are much more efficient and using your core.
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