Be aware of your use of bifocal glasses. I’ve seen many patients that inadvertently stress the nerves and muscles in their neck by spending so much time with their head and neck tilted upward to look through the bottom of their glasses. This tightens the suboccipital muscles at the base of the skull and contributes to a “forward head” posture. Some have opted to use a single prescription lens to avoid this position. It also helps to keep your glasses up closer to your eyes and not at the tip of your nose.
Stand up every time you take or make a phone call.
Keep your low back in a neutral alignment from left to right. It’s the same idea as the neck. Constantly curving the low back's spine one direction so you can lean on your chair’s arm rest is a recipe for disaster. This can commonly lead to nerve compression at the low back as well as muscle length imbalances.
What does core training mean to you?
To some people it means sit-ups, side dips, and crunches. To some, it’s planks.
Even though those are useful conditioning exercises to build baseline fatigue resistance and baseline strength, focusing only at this level shouldn’t be our stopping point.
I’d argue for a different approach, at least some of the time, because high-level athletic function demands more than pure strength from the core.
Proper core training means developing an ability to:
1) generate and sense stability
2) sense your general position and posture
3) control your movement to a finer level
4) do all of these things simultaneously, across multiple positions
Particularly with heavy lifting tasks or running, there are massive stability needs at our hips, pelvis, and spine. Lack that stability and things get sloppy, which is nothing but an energy suck and injury risk. Don’t confuse stability with a complete lockdown either. Your nervous system is smart, so it will happily do things like locking your lumbar spine into extension with a forward pelvic tilt to achieve a false core stability. Young runners often get away with this. Older runners might start to notice it hurting their low back. Either way, it’s a lazy, passive form of stability instead of the dynamic stability your muscles should provide to keep your overall movement reigned in.
Take a peek at each of these videos and you’ll notice that I take a second to explore the extremes of what my spine movement will allow before deciding on the middle ground as the position for training. Because I don’t want to run in a hyperextended spine position, I’m not usually going to train there. Once you find your stable position, maintain control of it while you move other areas of the body. You might want trunk stability while the hips move. Maybe hip stability while the trunk moves. It’s all core training.
