Core Training, Making Improvements and Increasing Performance

You may think of the core as isolated abdominal muscles such as the familiar transverse abdominals, oblique’s, and anterior abs. In fact, your core is the ENTIRE trunk from your hips and pelvis to your neck and cervical spine. Its purpose is to be your body’s foundation for all of your sport movements. The purpose of this foundation (your core) is to STOP or control motion, not create it.

In fact, the definition of stability in athletics is to stop or control motion in the presence of motion somewhere else in the body such as in the swinging arms and legs of a runner. The true goal of core development is to create STABILITY, which is central for superior athletic performance, protection from injury, and overall good health. The pelvis and the lumbar spine, in particular, must be rock solid.


Most athletes do not realize that core stability is how you transfer power to your arms and legs. Without stability in the pelvis and the lumbar spine, your biggest muscles, or prime movers, the glutes, quads, hamstrings and lats cannot activate. The ability to generate ballistic output and speed originates from a neutral pelvis and a stable lumbar spine never from the limbs alone. The more stable the core, the more power you can generate with your extremities. Core stability allows your entire kinetic chain to fire at optimal efficiency.

Over the past few months I have worked on my core for the purpose of improving performance in swimming, biking and running as I train to return to the world of Triathlons. I have focused on this area by using P90X2 and Insanity, The Asylum. The core centric workouts which I am using focus on balance and overall strengthening of the core. In particular the Base and Balance, Core and Total Body are  workouts from X2 and the Back to Core workout from Asylum have all helped to tightened my core.

The core is designed to reactively stabilize during dynamic movements. In other words, the core kicks in to prevent inefficient motion in the presence of motion elsewhere in the body. For example, as a runner swings his arms and legs, a properly functioning core reacts to stabilize the spine, pelvis, and shoulders and allow for the transfer of power to the legs. This reactive stability, coupled with proper mobility, muscular balance, and overall functional strength, allows for the optimal firing of your big prime movers. The supporting stabilizing muscles can then go to work to keep good biomechanical form over long distances.

Many athletes have been led to believe they are enhancing their training by doing an exercise like sit ups and crunches. Many popular “cult” training programs that are thought to be “cutting edge” and cool include these kinds of exercises. Core stability has no relationship whatsoever to working abdominal muscles in isolation. Exercises like these allow motion to occur through the lumbar spine, negating the functional purpose of that area of the body. The lumbar spine is not meant to greatly twist and flex, and the disks in the back are harmed by those movements. Sit ups, crunches, leg lifts and the like are completely counterproductive to your goal of becoming a better athlete.

To ignite your core into a powerful athletic movement that it is designed to be, you must train the “core” in a functional, sport-specific, and authentic way. Quality functional movement and strength training is the way to go.

When you have a truly stable core, it is then and only then that you can safely and effectively increase load and dynamism in training. It is then that your sport-specific training will really begin to work, and the results you have been searching for will begin to manifest.