Importance of core stability
Ready to work that core? When thinking of core stability, one might associate the image of sweaty people torturing themselves for 30 minutes, striving for a 6 pack while their abdominals catch fire or completely give out. While having a 6 pack might be the best thing you can do for your physical fitness (just kidding, it is functionally useless) this is not the reason maintaining a strong core is so important.
Our core muscles make up all of the muscles in our trunk, not just our abdominals, including the muscles that connect the arms and legs to the trunk. They serve to surround and stabilize the spinal column and anchor our limbs into our trunk helping to distribute the forces our joints experience throughout every-day movement. This means that movement of the limbs has a pretty big impact on the stability of the joints in the trunk, especially all the joints in the spinal column, and the stability of the joints in the trunk strongly effects the way we move our limbs.
So how does this all translate to our daily lives? If we do not have stability, then mobility will be either ineffective or compensatory (using non typical movement strategies) in order for the goal of the movement to be achieved. You might ask yourself “What’s wrong with that? Who cares how I move as long as I’m getting the job done?”. It matters because the different joints in our bodies are supposed to fill a role with varying degrees of mobility (movement) and stability (control), so if one joint is not doing its job properly, it will change the role of at least one other joint, something our bodies don’t often take kindly to. Repetitive nontypical movement often puts physical loads on body structures that are not meant to withstand that type of load, which can lead to pain and dysfunction most commonly in the neck, back, shoulders and hips. You have to have stability before you can have mobility.
If we think of our core as the stability maker and our arms and legs as the movers and shakers, how do we create stability before mobility? Stabilize the trunk and the moving limbs’ connection to it, aka “anchoring into the core”. This will not only improve the efficacy of the movement and how much of a load you are able to withstand, but it will protect joints and improve balance.