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Hello, today I'm going to be talking about core work, ab work, having strong sexy-toned abs. I don't know, whatever the reason that you want to learn about core work. Maybe you've just had a baby and you feel like you can't feel your abs at all and your neck just hurts when you try and do ab exercises. Maybe you've been on Instagram and you've been told you have a mummy pooch. Uh sorry, I can't. Um maybe you have been training your core for a while and it started to feel stronger and now it just doesn't anymore. Maybe you have uh tightness or aches or pains around your midsection, kind of like you know, your lower back or your sides of your hips, and someone has told you core work might help. I am here to talk about everything I know to do with core work so that hopefully you can get some insight. I'm gonna start with the rehab lens. So this could be rehabbing from um having a baby, or let's say you've had back pain for a long time and we're introducing you to core work. A lot of the stuff you'll see, at least on my algorithm, is all about deep core. It'll be saying, Oh, don't do sit-ups because you need to train your deep core. Which I think is misleading because um the core is not going to work in isolation for one. Um, but also what happens is people talk about deep core muscles and what that I think they mean when they do that. They do the videos where they go, don't do this, with like a big cross, and then like tick, do this instead. What I see happening is the movements that they're telling you not to do. I mean, to be honest, they could be anything. Like, I have no idea where they it depends on the person, right? It depends on what's but I don't know really why they decide not to do certain movements. That's up to each individual creator to just like because I've tried to think about in my lens, like, okay, if I was making this post, what would be my reasonings of doing this? But what they tend to tell you you should do tends to be movements where your your trunk, your core, so we're talking everywhere from your uh where your legs start, I guess. I was gonna say like where your pants are, but everyone's got different pants on. Um or maybe none at all, hey, uh no judgment here. Um so you know, from like where your hip crease is, if you were to lift your your leg up, like bend your knee and lift your knee towards your tummy, the crease of your hip, right? So where your leg starts, all the way to your chest, I would describe that as your core, okay? So like the it's mainly your abdominal muscles, it includes your deep core, if you want to call it that, and it includes your whatever the opposite of that is, your shallow core. I mean, who knows? Your superficial core, the bits on top. You have a couple of layers of your core. Um, depending on someone's job, deep core will be your transverse abdominis, your TVA, which is when they talk about wrapping around like a corset and zipping up. You might have seen that cue, you might not. Um, if you're a pelvic physio, you'll be including the pelvic floor in your core. So, really, okay, we're gonna go from instead of from the way your leg starts, we're thinking about kind of right down to the bum cheek. So, like cut off your core underneath the bum cheek where your leg starts from your bum, and then go all the way up to your neck, so your shoulders and the back of your shoulders and your upper back and your mid back are also involved. So it's not just your abs, um, it's also your whole trunk. What I'll see generally is that they just say don't move this part of your body. So they'll do many different exercises, and your arms and legs might be moving, and you might be on your back, or you might be in like an all-fors position, or you might be on your side. But generally, what's happening is that your spine is not bending at all. So, I think the reason why they say, Oh, this works your deep core is because you are keeping your spine stable and then moving legs and arms and stuff around, that means that you're having to stabilize with some of these muscles which they're describing as the deep core muscles. And they do work. I do them with people, I do them especially in early postpartum, or if someone has the kind of pain where bending gives them a lot of pain, or they are fearful of bending for some reason. They could be fearful of bending in any direction, and I'll explain that in a minute, because it's given them pain in the past, they could be fearful of bending because somebody in a position of power, like a surgeon or a doctor, or a physio, or even a coach, has said, don't bend like that, or you will hurt yourself. And those kind of beliefs get lodged in our brain, and it's really understandable. Then people don't want to bend because they think, well, I'm gonna get hurt if I do that. In early postpartum, I would do it because sometimes when all the belly muscles have been stretched out to house a baby, they lack the kind of tension. So if you imagine, you know, when you got like a hairband and you stretch it out and it pings back, that's kind of how we want muscles to act. We want to stretch them out and then they can contract and come back. Where these muscles and the connective tissue in the middle of the abs has been stretched out for a long time. Sometimes that bounce back has been lost a bit. You know, you get a hairband that's just like it's not a good hairband anymore. It's just it's just not able to stretch back. And so you're like, well, I can't really tie my hair up like this, otherwise, I have to do like three and a half loops round, and then an extra one, and it's just kind of like then I go for a run and it kind of falls down to the bottom of my head. We all know there's kind of hairbands. The difference is with your body, your your belly hairband, your abdominal muscles can come back. We just need to train them. And this is what I experienced with my belly is if you if I was to look in the mirror and I did take a picture of it, my belly was floppy, for want of a better word, because the muscles had been stretched out. And when I tried to contract the muscles, like I tried to tense the muscles, I had some level of the muscles tensing up and shrinking back up, like that hairband which has been stretched out and then and then the it comes back, but it wasn't very strong and I couldn't feel my abs working. So I think it's also important to say that, like, depending on how many kids you've had and what your body is like and what your connective tissue is like, and everybody's different, there isn't necessarily the expectation that your belly should be able to contract back to pre-pregnancy state, especially when you're not actually exercising. I think the goal that we need to look at is when you are exercising, can you get that? When I say shrinking back, I literally just mean that the muscle is contracting. So the muscle, when it's lengthening and being stretched out like a rubber, like an elastic band, the muscle gets longer and wider. And on the other side of the joint that we're looking at, that other muscle will get shorter and more compressed. And this is what happens. So then when that muscle, let's say we're looking at your your belly, there's lots of muscles, but let's say we're looking at your six-pack muscles. If we stretch them out by arching your back, and then we round your back like a sit-up, we actually want the we're actually getting the muscles to shrink back and to pull together and to tense up, and that's how we're using the muscles to create movement. So the muscles actually pull on the bones and create different shapes of your body. I've already basically told you why I think staying in the position where you're only doing these movements where your spine is not bending at all is it's not stupid, it's not enough, in my opinion. It's not enough to have a healthy, resilient, well-rounded body in terms of movement and your abilities. But the reason I would use these deep core exercises where the body is not moving with a postpartum client is because it's easier in most exercises to find a mind-muscle connection when you hold a muscle statically because there's just less going on. Um, there's just less moving parts, and we can isolate that thing, and we can really get a connection. When it comes to the deep core work, if it's not paired with breathing, for a lot of clients it's not going to be something that leads to improving the sensation with your abs and improving the mind muscle connection. So once you've got the mind muscle connection, once you actually feel like you can feel your abs at all working, and I've had plenty of clients that have come to me and they've done loads of exercises, they've done the right exercises, and they just feel their neck, or they just feel the lower back, or they just feel nothing happening. And that is often because they haven't been taught how to re-establish the mind muscle connection to those muscles which have been lengthened and have been stretched out, and those muscles haven't been used to contracting and shh like pulling back together because that they're when you've got a baby in there, it the baby itself kind of makes it hard to actually bend your spine because the baby's in the way, so those muscles have not been used to contracting a lot of the time, and so the first thing I do with clients is learning to contract and relax those muscles. In the same way, if someone has been in pain for a long time, back pain, whatever pain, like in their core, um, I want to control the movement. So if I can get them to get stronger in a safe environment, and what I mean by safe is it doesn't send their body a signal of panic, like other movement might be doing. If we're moving, one position could be fine, and then we bend a bit more, bend a bit more, and that position is not fine, their brain goes, Oh, that hurts, I shouldn't do this. If we can isolate a specific area of that movement and stay still there, like in the deep core exercises, and get them to experience, like, oh, I'm working hard, I'm exercising, I'm getting stronger, but I'm not in pain. That sends a really nice signal to their body as evidence that exercise is something that could work for them and could be positive, and their body over time can start to register. Okay, I know every time before I tried to work my abs, it really hurt me, but this time was different, and over time the body will learn that movement can be safe. So, there gets to a point where you get really, really good at these deep core exercises, and you're feeling the abs, you're working hard, you've overloaded it, you've made it harder in all the ways that you can. The problem that I see is that life doesn't happen with a straight and neutral spine. Because if we go back to the lengthening and shortening of the muscles, the muscles in our spine, and these aren't necessarily the deep core muscles. I don't know why we've decided that the shallow core muscles or whatever you want to call them are not important, because they really are. Also, if you want a six-pack, you've got to train the shallow core muscles, just saying. Um when you sit up out of bed, you're doing a sit-up, right? And you're using your shallow core muscle. I'm gonna start this as a thing. You're using your shallow core muscles, the useless, useless, shallow core muscles that we never use apart from every time we use them. When you sit up out of bed, you're not gonna keep your spine perfectly flat. It's not gonna happen. So you could have a really, really strong core because you've been doing planks and dead bugs and side planks and all these deep core muscles, but your spine actually can't bend. And so getting up out of bed feels really hard. Your body will adapt to whatever stress you put on it, and if you adapt it to keeping this thick block-like never bend your spine thing, your spine will lose its ability to bend until you train it to bend. I find that in any part of your body, if muscles have not been lengthened for quite some time, if they haven't got that stretch, they're not gonna be feeling very happy. So, in this core work, we could be working our core all the time, but because our spine is this I'm yeah, sorry, because you know you just get like a word fart and you just like get confused about what you're even saying. So, because our spine is designed to bend forwards, imagine a sit-up, imagine bending over to tie your shoelaces, imagine um even like sitting on the sofa in like a rounded shape, you know, we're not gonna be like pinned straight up, like a slouch, right? Imagine that position, a slouch. Evil position, not really, not really. And I'm gonna explain why. A lot of people see uh a lot of people in the in the fitness industry will say that that's like a bad shape, which it's not at all because it lengthens the back of our body. So if you think about the muscles running all the way from the base of your skull down between your shoulder blades, all the way down to your lower back, there are these long muscles that go the length of that um space, length of that, whatever, the length of your body. And if we are never rounding forward, they are never getting stretched out, and so they're always staying in this same tension. So we're only ever training them in one position and we're not letting them stretch out and then come back and stretch out and come back, those joints are not bending, so we're not basically training our body to have all the movement that our body should and could have. We're denying that part of our body movement at all. And if you look to other parts of your body, if you look at your elbow, I think we all accept that your arm should be able to be fully straight with your elbow fully straight, and that your arm should be able to be fully bent so that your forearm is kind of touching your bicep and your hand is touching your shoulder on the same side, right? We accept that the elbow to be a healthy elbow needs to be fully straight and then fully bent. And when we straighten our elbow, we lengthen the muscles on the front of our upper arm, the bicep, and we shorten the muscles on the back of our arm, our tricep. And then when we bend our elbow and touch our hand to our shoulder, you can do it with me. Bend your elbow, touch your shoulder with the same hand, we shorten the bicep on the front side of the upper arm, and we lengthen the tricep on the back side of the upper arm. So the muscles have like a pull and a push. If one is pulling, like if one is if one is longer, one the other side is shorter, and vice versa. So if we go back to our sit-up example, if I am doing a sit-up and I am lengthening all down the back of my spine, nice stretch, I'm shortening the front of my spine. I could do a sit-up where I'm sat or like leaning on one of those big squishy balls, the big physio balls. I could do it so that my back actually arches out and I lengthen the whole front side of my belly. And after I'd have my C-section, this was a movement I'd really lost. I had really lost the ability to extend my spine, to actually lengthen my belly, my uh, to be honest, the whole front side of my body. Um, and I definitely had lost the ability to lengthen through my chest. And if you think of that, that slouching posture, right? The only way we're gonna undo or work on that slouching posture is by opening up the front side of the body and actually getting some length through the sternum area, through the chest, through the front of the neck. And you've got to do that by bending. Like you can't just I don't know. I just think it's weird that we don't bend our spines. Um, so in this way, if we do those two movements, we have lengthened both sides and shortened both sides. We're getting strong in both. And when it comes to like lower back pain and stuff like that, if those muscles have never been stretched out, no wonder they feel sore. And at the same time, if we're not stretching them out, we're probably not really making them very strong either. So sometimes just getting someone to be able to bend their spine can go a long way to alleviating any kind of back pain, hip pain, stuff of people having. Now it's gonna blow your mind. Um, your spine should also be able to bend sideways. So if you imagine that you you can even do this, I know podcasts aren't the best format for this, but I like podcasts, so here we are. If you stand up really tall and you lift your arms above your head, and you don't bend forward or backward in the way I just described, you lean your hips to the left and you reach your arms to the right. So I'm basically creating like a big arch and I'm feeling the stretch all up one side of my body. So if I you the other way you can do it is you could stand just with your arms by your sides, and you're going to not move, like don't round forward and don't arch back. So stay tall, and you're going to slide one hand down that thigh until it reaches as far down as you can to your knee. You should feel a stretch on the opposite side abs. Okay. So we should be able to bend sideways as well. Oftentimes it's something that we're not doing if we're just doing the deep core exercises. We should also be able to rotate. So we should also be able to spin in our spine and our neck, so that if you imagine that you're like a kebab with I don't know, mushrooms, courgette, chicken, okay? Just dreaming of barbecues now that it's raining again here. If we twist each of those pieces, but the spike is the axis, can you see how that's a different movement to you couldn't really bend that uh spike sideways because it would snap. But luckily you're not a kebab stick. But just to give you a visual of that, okay? So you should be able to, if you sit down on a chair, you should be able to turn your top half to look behind you, or at least to look slightly behind you, and then you should be able to turn the other way. So we've got so many functions of our spine that we could be utilising to get these muscles to lengthen and to get these muscles to then contract and shorten. I believe this leads to a healthy back, a healthy spine, healthy core, and pelvic floor. Um I also think it's way more useful for life because let's say you are going to pick up your child because you hypothetically, just saying, hypothetically, you haven't got round to putting a stairgate on the top of the stairs, which I don't know who would do that. Um but like hypothetically, let's say yesterday your child wanted to run down the stairs and you had not been paying the best attention and you had to leap up and get them, um you are not going to be able to. I mean, there's a whole nother thing here about sprinting and running and stuff, which is basically the same concept. Use it or lose it, the most dangerous movement is the one you never do. But I'll do another whole podcast on that because I love talking about it. If you're having to do an unpredictable movement, are you going to be able to go up to said child, be like, wait, child, stand in front of them. Perfectly keep your core aligned and pick them up. No, you're not. You're probably going to be twisting, bending, leaping, rounding your spine. We want your body to be prepared for that. And we want your body to feel, even if they just they're just standing there and you're cooking and you turn around, you go, Hi baby, what do you want? And they go, Oh, I want to come up and be with you. You would probably lean over, so you're you're rotating, you're rounding, and you're picking them up. That should be something that feels doable and comfortable for you, and not something that sends you into a panic because you're worried you're gonna hurt yourself. But it's really understandable that you're worried you're gonna hurt yourself because if you haven't trained it, your body's not used to it, and your body might hurt itself because it's not used to that movement at all, because we've only been doing our deep core exercises, which happen in a straight line with no bending, no rounding, no twisting, and everything like that. So the way that I am working now, pain is a bit different because with pain, the the the exercises that I choose would be dependent on the person in front of me in terms of what they're presenting with and what is good for them, what's not. I think staying in those static movements with someone in pain is um it can lock people up and make them more rigid. Most people actually need more movement in terms of their spine. Most people actually need to learn to relax and not hold so tense. But in terms of like postnatal rehab, the focus that I've got now in my advanced core class is I know you can do your deep core exercises. I know that we've taught you how to engage your abs with your breathing. I know that we've learnt to keep the pelvic floor healthy and happy by how we're managing the pressure, which is a topic for another day. But I know we've taught you that stuff when your spine is static. Now let's get you bending and arching your back and opening up the chest and the front of the abs. Let's get you rounding your lower back, your upper back, and doing sit-ups. Let's get you bending sideways both ways. Let's get you rotating. And teaching those skills is a whole other part of movement. You actually probably need to learn how to rotate properly without just using your neck. You probably need to learn how to do a sit-up without just using your neck. You probably need to learn how to actually round your spine with control and not just the thunk like onto the mat if we're doing sit-ups. But you know what's cool now is people can do sit-ups without assistance. People can feel the side of their body lengthening, and people go, Oh, that's so nice on my back, that's so nice on my hip, that's so nice on my side. Yeah, because we're actually giving it that stretch that it's always been looking for, you know? It's just never been stretched, and it's sad. So core work is really simple if you don't have pain and you're not early post and you're not basically if you don't have pain and you feel your abs working and it doesn't make you want to pee yourself. Um, core work is simple. Bend forward, arch back, bend sideways, bend the other way, as in getting a stretch on your sides, and twist your spine. You can find all the different variations to do that. And a lot of uh the gym bros and stuff are actually on it. They're doing sit-ups, they're doing Russian twists, they're doing side bends with a dumbbell. And when you get strong there, load it up with weight. Make it harder. The other thing we do with core work is I just don't think we make it hard enough. I think we don't um I think we just go, like at first it's so hard and we can't do a sit-up and we can't do a plank. So then we do a 30-second plank and then we just keep doing a 30-second plank. And obviously, it's natural to just be like, oh cool, I'm done now. No, make it harder, add weights, make it gross, make it disgusting, just be indestructible, you know. Not actually indestructible, but you know what I'm saying? It's exciting, like it's it's fun. I think it's fun to get stronger. And I think in core work, a lot of the time we don't think about something called progressive overload. Like in your weights training, if you train with me especially, you'll know. I'm saying, is it heavy enough? Can you do 10 more, or do you have to stop in like two or three reps? If you can do 10 more, we need to go heavier, and it's the same with your core work. Just because you did 10 reps, or just because you got to 40 seconds, if you could do another 40 seconds, we need to make it harder. And the other thing about that is it's really time efficient. You don't need to spend, I don't know, 40 minutes doing core work if you get the same effort through your core in three sets of 10 on three different exercises bending forwards, bending sideways, and you know, twisting. Maybe four exercises if you also want to arch your back. Um so yeah, that's how I would progress it. I'd start static and I'd open up out into bendy movements, and then I would add weight to it. Um you can try that yourself. You can try that way of training, and you can try and see how you feel. If you do the bending movements, the arching movements, and the twisting movements, and you're like, oh, this feels clunky, this feels tense and stiff. That is when we can look at some gentler movements to teach you that movement. And I use sensory drills, which are basically drills where we're not trying to muscle it, we're trying to visualize moving with no tension. And that has been really helpful with my clients to re-educate the body how to find that movement without creating layers of tension upon more tension. So if you already feel tight and we just force it, I think that tends to make people tighter and more restricted in their movement. But if we actually take it back a step and go, let's let's let's learn this movement with no tension and then we can add weight to it, that is having really good results with a lot of my clients, again, who came to me and couldn't feel their abs working or their back was so tight, and now they're finding that they can do these movements with heavy weights, and so they get sore in their abs, but they're not creating more tension in their back or their neck or their I don't know, like a big one is like down the side, like for me anyway, down the like the muscles kind of between my rib cage and my hip on the sides, they tend to be quite tight, so those side bending movements are really good for me. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. Go start getting bendy with your ab movements, and I will see you on the next episode.