The Core Strength Myth

Myths, by their very nature, are very hard to dispel once they've taken hold. Despite the core stability myth being exposed nearly ten years ago, and journalist Peta Bee writing about it in The Times in 2010, from conversations I have with people I'd say its hold is as strong as ever. 

The myth is that by having a stronger "core" (a poorly defined term anyway) you will have better posture, less back pain, and will perform better in your sporting activities. There's an elephant in the room regarding this too and I'll come back to it later.

From personal experience I have never met anyone with a core so weak that they can't achieve good posture and less back pain without having to strengthen it. If you can walk into my Alexander Technique studio, your core is strong enough. And if it is technically a little “weak”, well-coordinated functional movement (the ability to perform normal daily tasks efficiently) will soon give it the tone it needs. Muscle tone, not strength; there's a world of difference! Balanced poise doesn't require "strength", and "stability" invariably translates into rigidity at the expense of mobility. What needs to be strengthened is coordination. 

What isn’t weak are the habits that pull you away from your natural poise and freedom of movement. Millions of years of evolution have given you postural reflexes that work just fine if you don't interfere with them (assuming normal movement exploration in early childhood). You don't need to "do" good posture, simply stop doing bad posture. Stop thinking of posture as a correct position and instead as a dynamic and fluid balancing act. A better phrase for what's required might be Core Coordination, but even that doesn't encompass the full range of coordination required for the whole human organism to balance in an upright manner.

Not having read his other books I've not had a chance to see if he developed or changed his ideas over time. But I have spoken to a number of Pilates instructors (and had great feedback from my own clients about their Pilates instructors) who now place much less emphasis on this "drawing in of the stomach", working instead on the quality of movement in general, strengthening movement rather than muscle, which I can get on board with. It's all relative. I have been challenged that some people can't do the plank because their core is so weak. But that's not normal functional movement. Who needs to do the plank in their daily lives? And I have nothing against being generally strong. I just challenge whether it's medically necessary for the "core" to be specifically so to overcome back pain and improve posture.

Ironically, Stuart McGill, professor of spine biomechanics at the University of Waterloo in Canada, has shown that drawing in the stomach during movement can actually destabilise the spine. “In studies we have done, the amount of load the spine could bear was greatly reduced when subjects sucked in their belly buttons,” he says. “What happens is that the muscles are brought closer to the spine, which reduces the stability in the back. It becomes weak and wobbly as you try to move.”  

The idea of core strength may have stayed within the Pilates community but for Professor Paul Hodges, head of human neurosciences at Queensland University. He performed experiments by attaching electrodes to two groups of people, one with healthy backs and another with chronic back pain. His results showed that the healthy group engaged a deeply embedded muscle called the transversus abdominis, causing it to contract and support the spine just before movement. In those with back pain, no such engagement took place, leaving the spine less supported. Hodges then claimed that this muscle could be strengthened by “drawing in” the stomach during exercises and this provided some protection against back pain. What he failed to see was that this wasn't an issue of poor strength, but poor coordination. Despite no clear link to core strength, the concept quickly spread spawning a huge rise in exercise classes based on Hodges work. And before you knew it, a stable core was lauded as a prerequisite in the fight against back pain and postural problems.

Thomas Nesser, assistant professor of physical education at Indiana State University, later tried to establish a positive link between core stability and the ability to perform ordinary daily tasks, but failed! He says that “despite the emphasis fitness professionals have placed on functional movement and core training for increased performance, our results suggest otherwise”. When he looked at top football players he found that those with a strong core played no better than those without. He concluded that “the fitness industry took a piece of information and ran with it. The assumption of ‘if a little is good, then more must be better’ was applied to core training and it was completely blown out of proportion.”

For an in-depth look in to all of this there’s Professor Eyal Lederman’s paper The Myth of Core Stability - he’s an osteopath with a PhD in physiotherapy. Thankfully Jeff Cubos, who works in sports injury rehabilitation, has already reviewed it and I recommend you read his summary here.

My two favourite take home points from Jeff’s summary are: 

• Focusing internally to concentrate on contracting stomach muscles is counter-intuitive to motor learning principles.  Focusing on tasks external to the body is more conducive to performance improvement. 

I’m telling my clients this all the time: you don’t hit a tennis ball by focusing on your muscles, but with spatial awareness, and:

• Chronic and recurrent back pain has been shown to be associated more with psychological and psychosocial factors.

This is Alexander to a T, in other words, it’s how you react to your environment.

Lederman has also been inteviewed and is worth checking out, it makes his academic paper much more accessible.

This article from SimpleBackPain makes some good additional points, especially with regards to breathing which I often note is especially restricted in my clients who attempt to over compensate with their concept of their core. The article summarises it’s points as:

Obsessive strengthening of transverse abdominus causes problems in several ways:

• Raises the resting level of compression between the lumbar vertebrae = stiffness
• Causes a loss of lumbar hollowing (lordosis) and stooping of the upper back
• Causes ballooning and weakening of the pelvic floor
• A permanently cinched-in abdomen reduces breathing efficiency of the diaphragm
• Breathing difficulties (asthma, sleep apnoea) and panic attacks may be related
• Over-awareness of ‘switching on’ TrA reduces spontaneous spinal movement = stiffness

I enjoyed this YouTube interview with physiotherapist Peter O’Sullivan on core stability, more food for thought:

He now calls his work Cognitive Functional Therapy, which wouldn’t be a bad name to describe the Alexander Technique, although as a profession we’d prefer Cognitive Functional Education. I don’t know what his methods are for achieving change in his clients, but he’s certainly taking the principles in the right direction. Maybe a collaboration is in order.