Are Your Crunches Improving or Hindering Your ‘Core’?
Core strength is essential for dancers because it provides a solid foundation for their movements.
DO You Know What Your Core Is?
I think we can all agree that Core Training is an essential part of our strength and conditioning, dancer or non-dancer.
Core strength is essential for dancers because it provides a solid foundation for their movements. Core stability allows effective energy transfer to the limbs and helps achieve optimal control, stability, balance, and alignment.
Here are several reasons why core strength is important for dancers…
- Stability and Balance: The core muscles, including the abdominal muscles, back muscles, and hip muscles, form the central support system for the body. A strong core enables dancers to maintain stability and balance while executing various movements, such as turns, jumps, and lifts. It allows movement to feel easy.
- Control and Precision: Dancers need precise control over their movements to execute choreography accurately. A strong core allows dancers to initiate and control movements from their centre, leading to more precise and controlled actions. It helps dancers maintain proper posture, alignment, and body positioning.
- Injury Prevention: Dancing involves repetitive and demanding movements that put strain on various parts of the body. A strong core acts as a protective mechanism by providing stability and support to the spine and hips reducing the risk of injuries such as lower back pain, strains, and hip pathology.
- Power and Endurance: Core strength contributes to generating power and maintaining stamina in dance. It allows dancers to generate force and transfer energy efficiently between different body parts. With a strong core, dancers can execute explosive movements, leaps, and lifts with greater ease and endurance.
- Flexibility and Extension: Core strength complements flexibility training in dance. Strong core muscles support and stabilise the spine, which allows for a greater range of motion in movements such as backbends, extensions, and fluid transitions. The nervous system and related muscles can relax to allow less appropriate tone and more length in the tissues.
- Artistic Expression: A strong core enhances a dancer’s ability to express themselves artistically. It provides a stable and balanced centre from which dancers can convey emotions and portray different characters with fluidity and grace.
SO What Is The Core?
In the clinic, I view the core as the area between the pelvis and thorax (rib cage).
We could view the core as the skull to pelvis however, or even the full body from head to feet as the body is an interconnected system with no start or finish.
The primary muscles involved in the deep core area are the pelvic floor, transversus abdominis, multifidus and diaphragm. These muscles form a wrap or capsule that contain the organs and connect the thorax to the pelvis.
As they contract together as a team they create appropriate stiffness in the area to protect the abdomen and joints and assist with stability during motion.
There are then the outer muscles of the area that have more force and power. Muscles that we are more familiar with such as rectus abdominis, the obliques, the quadratus lumborum and the thoracodorsal fascia.
“It is important to understand that core strength doesn’t mean rigidity. ”
— Strength4Dance
We need to be able to move well in all directions. Your core needs to function well in a full backbend or a twist pattern. Bracing will also hinder the ability to breathe well into the diaphragm. The diaphragm is the driver of proper core function so reduced diaphragm function = reduced core function.
The Gray Institute uses a great term ‘mostability’ mobile and stable together. This is exactly how we want to view the core.
Training the core!
To develop core strength, dancers need to incorporate varied but targeted specific exercises into their training routine. Early-level Pilates-based work can train the deep core muscles well. Learning proper diaphragmatic breathing and maintaining this with dance is essential, and training full exhalation can also train these small endurance muscles to work well.
Movements with twisting are essential, as due to fibre orientation, this is the best plane of motion to activate the deep core. Power is also best generated by twisting movements and adding external load is key to progression.
Exercises need to follow the laws of specificity and overload. The job of the core in upright function is actually to decelerate movements such as extension, rotation and side bending.
Although we may like to ‘feel the burn’ of doing 150+ crunches to ‘train the core’ this doesn’t train the core to function well when you stand upright and start dancing. It is position specific. We can train the core easily in standing using band resistance.
There is also a side and back to the core area, but traditionally we only put most of our focus on supine and side crunches. Did you do 150+ back extensions in class also as part of your warm-up/conditioning?
Core training should be dynamic, 3D, with varied intensity and inclusive of hip control. This is the powerhouse of the body and the main area for efficient energy transfer to the legs and upper body.
In summary, we need a strong centre that can create fluid stability, and rigidity when required, and allows efficient energy transfer from the body to the limbs. A well-functioning core allows us to feel effortless in our movement. Good core training will target not just the abdominals but also the control of the pelvis and hips. As with all exercise, it’s important to note that building core strength should be done progressively and with proper technique to avoid injury.
Don’t want to wait to start some science-based core training?
Start some physio-based core and hip strengthening exercises that will bulletproof your core so you can dance and move with ease. Check out this 10-week programme that also includes resistance to keep your body improving!
Band-ITS Core 10-week Class Pack
$230.00