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Why Core Fitness Is Important by Bryan Ashbaugh


If you’ve listened to the buzz around the fitness world lately
or perused the latest workout books, you’ve probably heard the
experts referencing core fitness in some shape or form.
Traditionally, strength training has been dominated by
exercises focused on isolating the muscles of the arms and
legs. In fact, if you look at many of the weight machines that
have become popular in modern gyms, you’ll notice that they
require you to sit or recline while you use them.

While these machines will effectively help you build the
muscles that they target, the problem is that, in real life, we
don’t use our muscles that way. We lift a box from the floor to
a shelf, swing a golf club, push our children on the swing set,
or climb a rock wall. In fact, the vast majority of the things
we do require all of the muscles in our bodies to function
together and be coordinated through our mid-sections, or our
“core.”

While those activities may make the use of core muscles seem
very obvious, this area, made up of the muscles of our
midsection, are actually responsible for quite a few of the
more subtle functions as well, including posture, balance and
stability.

A weakened core will often result in poor posture and
stability, yet we don’t necessarily feel the results of it in
areas that show us a direct cause and effect correlation. For
example, poor posture, due to a weakened core, might allow our
hips to slip out of alignment resulting in knee pain. In fact,
quite a few of the chronic muscle and joint pain issues that

Americans are suffering with today stem from a weakened core.

It is no wonder, then, that exercise science has taken a
dramatic shift in recent years to include the core in strength
training regimes. Now, rather than using a machine to first
exercise your legs and then your arms, trainers are suggesting
that their clients use free weights or bands to combine
exercises such as a squat to overhead press. By linking the
two, people are forced to transition the exercise movement
through their core, and the core muscles in turn help to
maintain good posture throughout the exercise. The end result
is that we are exercising in a fashion that mimics the
movements that we use in everyday life, while creating better
posture and increasing our stability and balance.


About The Author: Bryan Ashbaugh has a Masters in Exercise and
Sports Science and is Co-Founder and CEO of
http://www.liveleantoday.com/. He has authored many
http://www.liveleant...icle.cfm?id+373 fitness and
nutrition articles. He has been in professional fitness for 8
years. If you want more information on other topics and a
fitness and nutrition plan for you go to
http://www.liveleantoday.com/.


[health and wellness] [core training]



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