A Daily Practice or Pre-workout Warmup for foundational core strength
Continuing from last week's newsletter, developing core strength requires a basic level of understanding in how our breathing impacts this process.
To Health Advocates—
I hope you all had an excellent week!
This week’s newsletter will be a continuation of what was discussed two weeks ago. If you haven’t read last week’s newsletter, you can do so here. I really encourage taking the time to go through last week’s newsletter, however, if you don’t want to, here is a quick recap on the topic and how the practice from this week’s newsletter can positively impact your health.
To develop increased core strength, we need to train our core muscles in unison with our diaphragm, which is our primary respiratory muscle. For some, this happens naturally, for others, motor control must be redeveloped after years of sitting, inactivity, or just mediocre movement quality. Any combination of those three is also a reality.
When we consider the relationship of our diaphragm to our abdominal muscles in our training, we develop the physical outcomes associated with doing so (stronger core, improved quality of movement, etc). Additionally, outside of just physical outcomes, we can improve physiological outcomes that drive better health (respiratory rate, parasympathetic state, etc). This week and last week’s writing focuses on the physical practice more than the physiological.
Having a daily warmup that trains these muscles and this relationship can serve as a standalone habit or as a warmup to your own exercise routine. I’ve had success with both options on myself and clients.
Below you will see a series of videos that break down this concept, ending with a standalone daily practice or a pre-workout warmup you can include in your own programs.
I hope you enjoy!
As always, thank you so much for continuing to support my work! If you know anyone who would benefit from this week’s newsletter, or would be interested in the general concepts I talk about each week, please forward them this page. If someone did forward this to you, you can subscribe here.
Video 1 - Categorizing breathing patterns for greater awareness
The first video is intended to bring awareness to what is going on with your core during a few common scenarios, followed up by intentional engagement of certain muscles. The movements will be broken down as follows.
A normal breath during rest, or sleep. The diaphragm will be working here and not much else.
A deeper breath during rest, as to exaggerate what that would look like. Also, a useful breath if you are trying to calm yourself down or destress.
A chest breath, which should be utilized during times of higher stress or high output during exercise. This is one I see people do, often unintentionally, when the demand doesn’t call for it. It is for high output or times of high stress.
Intentionally engaging my transverse abdominis (TrA) on an exhale and relaxing it on an inhale. Remember the TrA, is the corset muscle of our stomach and it drives our posture.
Intentionally engaging my TrA on an exhale, AND then holding that engagement on the inhale as well. This would then be an isometric contraction of the TrA, meaning its engaged but not moving (contracting and relaxing or flexing and extending).
Key point: The TrA (corset muscle) works as a counter resistance for our diaphragm (this is the entire point of this newsletter). Not only does the counter resistance strengthen the diaphragm, it is a mutual relationship where the TrA is also strengthened. This gives us the ability to improve our posture and breathe stronger, first during exercise, but then ideally, all the time.
(I am working on substack letting me upload videos natively into this page, but for now these links will bring you to Youtube to watch. Sorry about the inconvenience but hoping to have it resolved soon.)
Video 2 - A daily warmup for your workouts, or a stand-alone daily habit
This second video is meant to serve as an actionable plan that you can do daily. You can do this first thing in the morning to engage your core, hips, respiration, and in turn, develop more motor control over this area. If that doesn’t appeal to you, you can do this as a pre-workout routine before resistance training, walking, running, biking, whatever.
There’s an old adage in strength and conditioning that you don’t need to do dedicated core work because every exercise should be a core workout. Though I believe this to be true, it is also my belief after 10+ years of training that general population people, like ourselves, and not athletes, need to train these patterns specifically. We sit..a lot. We aren’t active all day long, our core and hip relationship changes because of this, and we spend a lot time breathing in shallow patterns.
This daily warmup is meant to serve as a tool that you can use for the bare minimum dose and develop motor control and strength in an area we tend to lose some ability in from our modern lifestyles. Once we redevelop some motor control here, all other exercises do, in fact, become core exercises.
Sets and reps for daily routine
*When practicing these, I always recommend nasal breathing for more motor control. A post on this will come later.
1a) TrA Contract and Relax breaths 4x 10 breaths
1b) TrA isometric breaths 4x 10 breaths
1c) Glute bridges 4x 10 reps (exhale on extension - inhale on return to start)
1d) Breath hold glute bridge 4x 10 reps
1e) Quadraped plank 4x 10 breaths
1f) Side Plank Variation 4x 30-60 seconds
Closing Thoughts…
I once trained a gentleman in Boston in his late 80s going into his early 90s for about four years. He walked four miles to get coffee every single day, and his waking up routine was as follows:
Roll out of bed
Bathroom
Lay back down on the ground stretching and doing core exercises for 10 minutes
Once task 3 was finished he “allowed” himself to eat breakfast
Do with that information what you wish, but remember, our health is a product of the habits we put in place.
As always thank you for subscribing and I hope you enjoyed this week. Going forward I will do my best to utilize videos and provide actionable guidelines for everyone to utilize. If you have any questions, please comment below. Also, if you know anyone interested in something like this, please forward this email to them. If you are one of those people, you can subscribe here.