What Muscles Does Your Core Consist of?
Your core consists of more than just your abdominal muscles. Along with the abdominal muscles you have your lower back and deep lower back muscle and glute musculature. All of these muscles work together to give you your main foundation for stabilization and movement. The abdominals consist of 4 muscles; the rectus abdominis, internal and external obliques and the transverse abdominis which is one of the most important and least trained muscle in the abs. The Transverse abdominis is responsible for proving stability throughout the trunk as well as improving stability of the spine.
Common Issues Due to Lack of Core Strength
A lot of people that are lacking total core strength or deficits in one of the main areas can experience different injuries because of this. You can develop lower back or hip pain because of poor position due to weakness, pain when sitting for longer periods of time, difficulty increasing weight when lifting at the gym and doing exercises such as deadlift and squatting, as well as pain with recreational sports or activities.
Core Strength Training
A lot of people that training their core is doing exercises such as sit ups, crunches, russian twists when in reality this is just scratching the surface and training only a few of the core musculature. When trying to train the deep core musculature you need a combination of various isometric holds in different positions and movements to help properly train the core for the proper support. In conjunction with training the abdominals you need to make sure that you have adequate glute and lower back strength to give an all around approach and support to the core as a whole
How Physical Therapy Can Help
After going through a comprehensive evaluation with one of our physical therapist, they will get to the bottom of where there are deficits, what the key areas you need to focus on are, and how these deficits are affecting you and then correcting these deficits with a personalized POC to get you back to where you need to be.
Give us a call at 703-450-4300 or CLICK HERE to get started with physical therapy!
