Engaging your core in every day life

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Sean McCawley, Fit for Life: Sciatica: a real pain in the derrière | Health & Fitness

The human body has many critically important functions we use in our everyday lives that are commonly overlooked. We use our necks to turn our heads from side to side and look up and down. Our arms perform complex movements to grab, hold, pull and push objects. Let’s not forget those other bones beneath our hips we use for one of the most essential movements: our legs so we can walk.

Unfortunately, minor injuries to our body shunt these unique capabilities. Random injuries affect simple everyday movements caused by a deconditioned core.

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Imagine how your body would exist if we temporarily shut down the use of our arms and legs. How would we move? Your head could still move up and down and side to side. Our torso could still sit up, rotate the spine and hips, and extend the spine.

Now, imagine your arms and legs had perfect functioning capacity, but you couldn’t sit up, extend your spine, or rotate your back. Life would be kind of rough. Looking over your shoulder to back out of a parking spot would be a struggle. Returning to an upright standing posture after a meal at the dinner table would pose a challenge.

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These issues illuminate the importance of having a strong, durable and unhindered collection of muscles, tendons and ligaments in the body’s core region. Our “core” is a collection of joints and muscles in the neck, upper back, lower back and hips. Granted, overall full body strength is critical to longevity and wellness. However, a significant amount of strength originates from the inner stabilizing features of the core.

A helpful tactic for our personal training clients is to bring awareness to core muscular facilitation of the neck, shoulder blades, abdominal, and hips to ensure the body sits, stands, and walks optimally upright.

Take a moment to visualize our bodies from a side profile. Note three key reference points: the ears, armpit, and hips. Making efforts to line the ears up over the armpits ensure the head is not hunching forward. Stacking the armpits over the hips presents the classic “hunch back of Notre Dame” rounded thoracic spine. Ensuring to stabilize the hips under the armpits prevents slouching in chairs while driving, sitting down at lunch, or performing desk work. These simple cues significantly aid in activating core musculature and contribute to injury prevention to the neck, shoulder blade region, and lower back.

Here are some helpful cues to typical activities we perform in our everyday lives that can bring awareness to utilizing our core muscles.

1. Looking at the phone: When texting, surfing the web, or interacting with your favorite social media platform, use your hand to bring the phone to face height. This prevents the head from tilting forward and causing an excessive outward bow in the thoracic spine between the shoulder blades. Additionally, ensure to line the ears up over the armpits. Positioning the ears over the armpits engages the muscles surrounding the neck to line the cervical spine correctly over the body.

2. Typing an email at your desk: Having the hands extended out and looking at a monitor for hours influences forward slouching of the upper back. This slouching creates rounding in the thoracic spine and collapse of the rib cage. To prevent this, use the cue “keep your armpits over the hips.” As I stroke the keys on my keyboard, producing this award-winning article, I am practicing this tactic to ensure my back doesn’t round. Unfortunately, my shoulder blades and lower back yell at me when I forget to do this while typing emails, reports and exercise prescriptions. Therefore, I must remind myself to keep my armpits over my hips at the desk.

3. Having a beer or glass of wine with your pals: Chairs at restaurants, bars, or in a friend’s patio chair at a picnic usually have smooth surfaces. This causes the buttocks to slide forward, resulting in the hips sliding in front of the body in a structurally weak position. This “sitting butt slide” can lead to impingement of the lumbar vertebrae leading to public enemy number one in the lower back world, sciatica. Keeping the hips underneath the armpits fends off nagging lower back pain, such as sciatica, after prolonged bouts of sitting.

These cues help to prevent debilitating afflictions on our bodies. Practicing these movements trigger muscles responsible for engaging the core. Regular attendance to a local gym, yoga class or recreational physical activity plays a prominent role in fitness; however devoting awareness toward simple tactics can strengthen our core without doing a sit-up or plank. Activating the core throughout the day and preventing common injuries is a key ingredient to help our everyday functionality.

Activating the core throughout the day and preventing common injuries is a key ingredient to help our everyday functionality.

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Sean McCawley, the founder and owner of Napa Tenacious Fitness in Napa,  welcomes questions and comments. Reach him at 707-287-2727, [email protected], or visit the website napatenaciousfitness.com.

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