In this blog, we are going to teach you how to engage your core. We will go through several exercises and things you should be doing to get that flat, lean, and muscular stomach—while also building a stronger midsection.
If you spend any time in a gym, exercise class, reading, listening or watching videos or shows about working out, you may have started hearing the phrase “Engage your core.” It’s being used by workout coaches more and more often these days.
For the inexperienced, this is often defined as “Tighten your abs.” However, there is a bit more to it than that.
What is Your “Core”?
More than just your abs, your core includes all the muscles making up your torso that help to keep it stabilized during movement. Your core, then, more specifically consists of the following parts of your body:
- Diaphragm
- Spinal erectors
- Abdominal muscles
- Hip flexors
- Pelvic floor
- Transverse abdominals
- Muscles of the lower back
- Abductor muscles
- The “glutes” or glute muscle group
Benefits of Engaging Your Core
Engaging your core, or tightening your abs, while you perform specific exercises can help make those exercises more productive and their benefits more pronounced. It can also help make your midsection sexier.
By engaging your core, your body is better able to transfer strength and energy back and forth between your lower and upper body. Engaging your core also helps to strengthen your core while preventing injury during exercise.
How to Engage Your Core
In terms of how to engage your core, there are many ways to do it. Before launching into some of those, however, one way you should not be engaging your core is by sucking your stomach in and holding your breath. That said, here are six suggestions on how to engage your core.
1. Strengthen Your Core
To help you engage your core more effectively no matter what method you use, it helps to have a strong core, to begin with. Oftentimes, however, after surgeries, procedures for cancer, and as a result of other medical issues, a person’s core can be weak.
To strengthen your core, perform exercises that build up and tone your abs, and flatten your stomach. Here are a few to do just that:
- Cat and Cow Pose – This traditional yoga pose is performed on all fours. As you inhale, tilt your head up and lift your tailbone, arching your spine. As you exhale, lower your head toward the floor, drop your tailbone, and round your spine. Repeat the movements up to 10 times.
- Plank – Get into a push-up position, resting on your forearms and keeping them perpendicular to your body. Make sure you form a straight from your shoulders to your ankles. Hold this position for up to 30 seconds.
- Bridge – Lying on your back, bend your knees with your feet flat on the ground. Lift your hips toward the ceiling, then release and lower your hips almost all the way back to the floor before repeating the action for another rep. Repeat up to 10 times.
- Weighted Walks – Grab a dumbbell or other lightweight in each hand. Hold your arms down straight at your sides, standing tall and keeping your chin parallel to the floor and your shoulders down and back. Maintaining this posture, take 10 paces forward, then turn and take 10 paces to return to where you began. Repeat as desired.
2. “Zip Up” Your Stomach
Instead of sucking in your stomach in a futile attempt to engage your core, zip it up instead. I know, sounds crazy right?
Zipping up your core is a matter of controlled breathing. First, breathe into the back and sides of your ribs as you inhale. Then, as you exhale, imagine drawing up the four points of your diamond-like pelvic floor through your spine and torso from bottom to top. It’s as though your pelvic floor were the slider of a zipper, and your spine and torso were the zipper’s teeth.
Zipping up your core helps to activate more core muscles while improving your breathing and posture. This, in turn, can help alleviate stubborn exercise-related neck and lower back pain.
3. Belly Button Pull
A similar technique to zipping up your core via your pelvic floor involves focusing on your belly button for the visualization instead.
For this version of the technique, you lie on the floor and imagine pulling your belly button up your spine toward your ribs, moving across gravity rather than against it, and then bearing down a bit while envisioning your belly button dropping down to the floor. This produces a slight contracting or tightening of the abdomen while keeping the ribs expanded. Also, it works great.
4. Bear Down
A different way to engage your core is to bear down on your abdomen and diaphragm as though you’re bracing for a punch. Just remember not to hold your breath.
Giving a short, guttural grunt can help propel your core into this position. Repeat this over and over until you can feel the muscles engage and disengage even without these exaggerative movements.
5. Cough or Laugh
If you’re just trying to feel what it’s like when your core is engaged, to feel what muscles are involved in expanding and contracting in this action, try coughing or laughing on purpose. Both of these actions naturally engage the core.
Pay specific note to how your core feels immediately before actually emitting a cough or laugh. This is the moment when your core is most engaged.
6. Use Your Hands
With your hands placed over each side of your belly, try to push them away with just your core muscles. The reference points of your hands and their pressure against your core muscles help you to more efficiently and accurately activate them.
Be Consistent
Finally, as many professionals and fitness gurus will tell you, be consistent! Create your plan, work your plan and be consistent with your plan. When you get right down to it, you might as well not even have a plan if you aren’t going to be consistent.
Recap
In this blog on how to engage the core, we defined what the core is, and talked about the benefits of engaging your core. For example, it can help make your stomach flatter and sexier.
We discussed effective exercises to engage your core and build the overall strength and stability of your midsection.
These included exercises such as the cat and cow pose, zip-ups, planks, belly button pulls, and others—exercises that can firm and strengthen all those little muscles that make up your midsection.
Finally, we mentioned the importance of consistency. And how without consistency, having a plan simply doesn’t matter. We touched on this in earlier blogs, like the one on how long it takes to get abs. So again, be consistent.
So, what is your favorite exercise for building your core?