Key points:
- Many of us bulge out of our core all day long during daily activities or at exercise classes.
- Bulging is not a great core engagement strategy because it means our core muscles cannot contain the pressure created by a load, weight, or task at hand.
- Try the lift two legs exercise to make sure you know what a bulge feels like.
- We also don’t want to brace. Suck your abdominal muscles in sharply to feel it.
- We want our core muscles to work reflexively without us having to tell them to ENGAGE!
Key points:
- Blow out 100 candles on a birthday cake, long and slow with a bit of force.
- Feel your core draw in towards the spine as a reaction to the breath.
- Follow the exhale from just above your pubic bone to your ribs and then out of your mouth.
- Ideally, you will practice this in some form for a minute or two most days until it feels like it has been firmly etched into your body’s memory/patterns.
- Then you can forget about it for the rest of the day. Unless you lift something heavy in which case. Use the candles exhale, feel the core doing the reflexive engagement, and then as you continue to exhale lift!
Please feed back to me in the WhatsApp group how you got on. Does it make sense in your body? Any light bulb moments?