- Use bodyweight exercises
Bodyweight makes you stronger because it improves strength and coordination which lifting weights or doing aerobic exercises does not do. You must be able to hold up your own bodyweight in the air. That means your arms, upper body, and trunk must be strong enough. This is the start of your own personal core strength. 🙂 Holding up your own bodyweight on the ground is a good starting place, but ideally you want to move to where your doing exercises where your feet don’t touch the ground.
2. Your core is not what you think it is
Your Core is mainly your arms and your abs. It forms a triangle from your arms and shoulders to the base of your pelvis front, back, and both sides. Total body control is when you incorporate your core and your legs for a full body move. Total body control comes after you get the initial core strength and cannot come before. There must be a progression from holding up your own weight in the air with your arms to straightening your body which takes mastery.
3. Learn to use your stomach and pelvic muscles
Pelvic muscles should be synchronized with the abdominal muscles. The first place we want to stabilize with is our pelvic floor and not our abdominal muscles. Stabilizing with your abdominal muscles or somewhere else, for example, your hips(hip flexors) creates incoordination and improper movement patterns.
4. Develop body awareness
You need to know inherently where you body is in space. Proprioception is the scientific term for this knowledge. If you want to do a handstand or do a good cartwheel it is very important you have proper body control and proprioception. Most people who have a lack of proprioception consider themselves clumsy or always knocking into things because they don’t know where their body is in space. Someone may reach for a glass and knock it over because they didn’t know where there hand was even when looking at it.
5. Learn muscle control
For strength and a toned good looking body, muscle control is the best thing to learn for you to meet all of your fitness goals. Body building has it right when it comes to muscle control. Flexing in the mirror is an incredibly healthy and necessary thing to do in order to improve proprioception, muscle tone, and strength. After your workout, flex in the mirror for 10 to 20 minutes and you will see an incredible change in the way your look.
6. Knees and Legs
When starting out with strengthening your core you should keep your knees tucked into your stomach and close as possible. The legs should be totally relaxed so as not to engage the hip flexors, quads, hamstrings, calvs, or anterior tibias(shin). When you get to be more advanced then you can straighten out your legs and this will give you an incredible tough workout for all of your abdominal muscles but specifically for your lower abs. The main problem with peoples core is that they don’t know how to differentiate between stabilizing with their hip flexors or abdominal muscles and then they don’t even know they should be engaging you pelvic floor, so there is just a giant lack of knowledge the subject.
7. Utilize different positions
It is important to work your core with your chest up, chest down and your chest facing side to side. You must make sure you work in all positions so that you can get a total body balance and not miss out on strengthening any muscles.
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