Increasing core strength can transform your yoga practice, improving your balance and agility and bringing more ease to difficult poses. However, tuning up your core means more than just building strength. A well-tuned core also involves increasing core flexibility and improving the brain’s ability to direct the core with ease. A radiant core can improve posture, reduce back pain, enhance your breathing and your digestion, and even increase emotional resilience. This week I will be focusing on some powerful core exercises that address all these points.

The Core is More

When we think “core”, we tend to think of the abs (the “six pack”, or rectus abdominis). However, the rectus abdominis is only one of four abdominal muscles. Moreover, the abs are only one of several muscle groups of the lower trunk that comprise “the core”. Many conventional core exercises target the rectus abdominis to achieve the currently desirable look of a wash-board stomach. However, strengthening the six pack in isolation can actually contribute to lower back pain because it can reduce the natural lumbar arch through a shortening of the front body. Strengthening the back muscles as well as the front is much more beneficial if you are focusing on wellbeing rather than aesthetics.

In addition to the rectus abdominis, the major core muscles that we want to strengthen include the transversus abdominis, the internal and external obliques, the lumbar erector spinae muscles, the pelvic floor muscles, the multifidi, and the ilio-psoas. Other important core muscles include the quadratus lumborum, latissimus dorsi, lower trapezius, and the gluteus maximus and medius. If this is all Greek to you (actually it’s mostly Latin) :), no worries. This week you will get to know the different groups of core muscles and what they do through asana practice, experiments and exercises.

Tune up Your Core for a Healthy Lower Back

How does a strong core protect the lower back, and why is this so important? If you look at a human skeleton, the architecture of the torso is quite striking. There is a rather dense assemblage of bones in the lower trunk (the pelvic girdle). The upper torso contains the somewhat less dense but more complex bony framework of the ribcage and shoulder girdle. The connection between the two, however, is a narrow series of 5 relatively small bones, the lumbar vertebrae.

This clearly weakest link in the chain may seem like a faulty design. However, it gives us the ability to flex, extend, and side-bend the torso to a surprising degree. Strong core muscles, however, are necessary to compensate for the relative fragility of the lumbar spine that is the flip side of this amazing mobility. Strong core muscles—in the front, back, and sides of the torso—help keep the lumbar spine in neutral alignment. This in turn allows it to transfer the weight of the upper torso into the hips without sustaining damage. When we bend our spine to pick up something from the floor, the core muscles actually help substantially in holding up the weight of the upper torso.

Tuning up Your Core Means Increasing Flexibility, not Just Strength

However, even building balanced core strength is not enough. As muscles get stronger, they get shorter unless the strengthening is done over the full range of motion and is combined with stretching. Overly tight core muscles can wreak just as much havoc on the lower back as weak core muscles. Thus we will also conduct experiments to see if any of your core muscles are overly tight. If so, we will learn how to stretch them to balance strength with flexibility.

Turn Every Yoga Pose into a Core Tune-Up

While there are yoga poses that seem specifically designed to work the core, it is quite useful to think of every yoga pose as an opportunity to engage the core. One way to do this is through balancing Inner and Outer Spirals in each pose, which was my classes’ focus last week. Engaging the core to create more neutral hip placement in pretty much any pose prevents us from overusing the lower back. In addition, keeping the movement out of the weakest link, the lower back, effectively directs the movement (and thus the stretch) into other parts of the body that are less flexible. In Uttanasana that’s the hamstrings, in Bhujangasana (Cobra) the hip flexors and the upper spine, and in Hasta Tadasana the lats.

Digestive Benefits of Tuning up Your Core

Tuning up your core can also have a positive effect on your digestion, and even on your emotional wellbeing. The contraction and relaxation of core muscles moves and stimulates the intestines and thus can help undo blockages.

A Radiant Core Benefits Emotional Health

Working the core can even help heal emotional trauma. Core work can give you access to unprocessed emotions stored in your subconscious, allow you to process them, and thus let them go. This works because the part of the brain that stores traumatic unresolved memories is closely linked to the brain centers responsible for maintaining chronic muscular tension, especially in the hips and core. Because of this connection, held muscular tension is a common side effect of having experienced emotional trauma.

The common description that “we store traumatic memories in the hips” is technically incorrect. However, it does get at an important truth. The connection between hip tension and emotional trauma is real. Core stretches can help to release the physical tension, and in the process stimulate the part of the brain that is responsible for holding the physical tension. Stimulating these brain centers in turn can trigger a release of the stored unresolved memories that are connected to the held physical tension. This in turn allows the memories to be consciously re-experienced and thus resolved.

If you ever find yourself overcome by strong emotions or charged memories during your yoga practice, don’t push them away. Instead, turn your awareness towards them and allow yourself to re-experience them without judging, without aversion, without pushing them away. The act of sitting with these emotions without judgement allows you to process them and to release them. If that means taking a break from the physical practice, please do what you need to do, even in the middle of a group yoga class. This is very important work, more important than one more hip or core stretch.