How to brace your core to protect your lower back!

So you're looking for ways to protect your lower back and you hear that bracing is a great way to do so. But what is bracing? What core muscles are involved in bracing? How do you brace? These are all questions that you need to ask, but the most important one you ask is what muscles do you need to strengthen, stretch or normalize to allow your core to work properly in all different facets, including bracing? Before we dig in, please take a second here to subscribe if you haven't already. Don't forget to hit the bell because that way you'll be notified about each time we put out videos how best to balance and strengthen your body so you can get out of pain, so you can move better, but more importantly so you can live life on your terms. Hi, I'm Akim Baso. I'm the owner of soulcore Fitness and I've been in this field as a profession for over 25 years. I've been in health and fitness my whole life. I've always worked out and tried to take care of myself through this whole process. I have gone from somebody who's been in for sports to get better at sports, to somebody who wanted to lose body fat and gain muscle, to choosing as a career and becoming a personal trainer all the way up to now to becoming a summer therapist and summer trainer. Through this time I've seen all sorts of hacks or tricks on how best to strengthen and balance your body. But it's not about hacks or tricks. It's about understanding where you are, where you want to go, the areas of need that you need, how to specifically train those areas that you need, then how to integrate the whole thing. I've done this with hundreds of clients and by doing so they've now gotten back to life that they want to live. Your core muscles should be strong enough, mobile enough, and aware enough to protect you at all times. Whether that's just picking something off the ground or having to pick a really heavy box or weight as you do a workout or activity. The problem arise is that if it doesn't work, it should be like a well old machine where things fire and move in a nice sequential order. Well, if it doesn't fire or if it doesn't move properly in these myofascial chains, that's where you end up with issues and you're back of course gets hurt. Bracing is a technique of contracting or activating your superficial muscles in your core or your trunk before you do an activity by working hard. It's also talked about with hollowing which is pull your belly button in. Generally, they talk about these two techniques in terms of effort, right? When I want to do some sort of activity or heavy lifting, I want to use one of these techniques to protect my lower back more. Well, two issues here is one, when you brace or hollow, you can think about using just your superficial or your deep TVA for either. But in actuality, they're all going to work together at the same time. I can't contract my superficial muscles without some activation of my deep muscles. I can't activate my deep muscles without some contraction of my superficial muscles. So you have to work together, but like most topics in health and fitness, kind of dogmatic. And they say, okay, this is the way to do it, but they're right. But they're also wrong. So you need to integrate it. But you shouldn't have to brace or hollow or whatever technique you want to throw out there your whole time, your whole life. I shouldn't have to brace and hollow. If I go pick a pen off the ground, my body should be able to work in different forms of effort. It should just function in daily life. If I have to pick some off the ground or reach and grab something in the cabinet all the way to I'm lifting 300 pounds in a squat or trying to max out my 1 RM for a clean and press, your core is going to work differently. Bracing and hollowing may help in some of those heavy activities, but they shouldn't have to be done throughout your daily life. You shouldn't have to think about that all the time. It's impossible. So before you even attempt to practice these techniques like bracing or maybe hollowing, you want to think about all the core muscles. Because if we are an interconnected, interdependent, holistic being, then all of the core muscles will help contribute to be able to protect that back during bracing or not. So all the core encompasses all four layers of the abs, the three main layers of the back muscles, your serratus, anterior, posterior, your diaphragm, little bit of your pelvic floor to help with the compression, your pec, your lats. I talked about all these muscles and how they help with back pain, but also how they help with herniations in the spine and the trunk, how they help with your energy and your fatigue, and how they can help with visceral problems. You can check it out right here and also put in the comments. But knowing that it's not just a couple muscles that are doing these activities is imperative to be able to do what you want to do with your core. So knowing that your core is just not a couple muscles, but all those different muscles and all the different ways that all those different muscle fibers go. How you train your core to be able to have it work properly and to be able to brace or to hollow is of utmost importance. Your core, like the rest of your body, is like links in a chain. Each link in a chain is one muscle that's connected to another muscle via fascia. That fascia can make those connecting muscles act like one big muscle. So you can think about you have one big muscle in these different myofascial chains that do different things, but all need to coordinate. So thinking about training all these different muscles in the different ways they need to be worked, but also train the fascia which dictates the shape and function of those muscles is super important. On top of that, you need to think about the most important muscles. I say the quotations, but the most important you can think about is the deeper muscles. So you have a set of deep muscles which we call prepare, imagine and think muscles. You have more superficial muscles which are do, act and move. This is a study done by Bergmark, so don't take my word for it. Talk to him. I don't know if he's still alive, but he developed this back in the 80s that the deep muscles dictate how well we move. Prior to that, people thought the deep muscles were holding my body in place. And that's true. But the more important function is that when I have a thought in my brain about to do a movement, that information goes through my body to allow me to produce a movement. If those deep muscles don't work properly, my movement is compromised. So it doesn't make any sense to not train those deep muscles first. Then you start thinking about working on superficial muscles, because then when you do the superficial muscles and then onto the global movements which is using your whole body as one, then those movements are more efficient because the deep muscles have been trained to allow the body to move properly. I want to take a second here to check in and to see. Are you looking for ways to protect your lower back? Are you using techniques like hollowing or bracing? Have you had success? Do you have difficulties? Just let me know in the comments. So that's all this information. Let's talk about a general program to strengthen your core so it does function properly, so you can brace properly or hollow or do your sport or activity. So a word of note, this is a general program. It's not one to be followed because I don't know where you're starting from, and I don't know what you need to focus on. But in general, we think about the deep muscles and superficial muscles and deep muscles dictating how well we move. We think about your tva, your transverse abdominis. It's like your internal girdle, your diaphragm, thoracic diaphragm, the one you breathe with, your pelvic floor, and then your transversal spinalis muscles that help connect your spine. So to train the TVA and the diaphragm, it's a little different than most muscles because I have to use a law called Pascal's Law, because there's no easy way to just say, flex your arm and work your bicep. You can't just do that with the TVA and diaphragm. But I can use the force from Pascal's Law to strengthen them. Pascal's Law says that if I exert force, especially on a spherical structure like a ball, that force that I push down goes omnidirectional in all different ways with equal force. So I can use that with a TVA and the pelvic floor to strengthen a diaphragm. So if I pull my belly button in, contract my pelvic floor, my peritoneum, and then use the breath breathing in to try and force out, or to release the the TVA and pelvic floor, but I keep it contracted with effort, that will cause strengthening of the tva. I use a similar technique for diaphragm. So I use a breathing technique to first get awareness of the diaphragm that when I breathe in, that my diaphragm goes down, my butt goes out, and I'm not shrugging my shoulders. But then I can use that to produce force. So I take a weight and I put it in my belly button. So once I have awareness of how to use my diaphragm and I put a weight here, now when I breathe in, I have to use more force from the breath and more force into Pascal's Law to strengthen omnidirectionally the entire diaphragm. To work the transverse spinalis, you can work them two ways. You can work them longitudinally because they help co opt or keep the spine together. They also work with extension and rotation. Extension and rotation can cause bad forces in your spine, because when I do rotation, I get compression in my spine. It's not bad if you're strong enough and mobile enough to happen. But right now we haven't trained that and I'm assuming that it doesn't do that very well. So training the transversor spinalis longitudinally to help open up your spine, to. To bring more awareness from your spine to your body and to keep everything flowing is the most important. The technique I like the best are Eldoas, because I can take each segment of my spine and target it with a specific posture to make sure I get each segment properly, as opposed to if I try and do something like hanging or inversion table. It's not specific and also doesn't produce an effort in your body so that your body learns and understands. After that, I'm going to ignore my deep and superficial rule because I would go to like the internal oblique, for example. But the internal oblique is similar to the transverse spinalis, that it produces a lot of rotation, and we can't handle rotation yet because you don't have a base level of movement and strength and mobility in your spine. To flex up from trunk to pelvis, from pelvis to trunk, inflection, and also extension trunk to pelvis, pelvis to trunk. That's very important to have that base level of strength to be able to do those basic moves. After that, then we go back to those deep muscles, the internal oblique, the external oblique, to be able to work those work the iliocostalis and all the different back muscles. But having that base level from the tva, the diaphragm, the transverse spinalis, the pelvic floor, and then base level of flexion of the trunk to pelvis, pelvis to trunk, and then extension of trunk to pelvis, pelvis to trunk is going to be the most important part of the program. So what is a good base level for these muscles? To be segmentally strong. So for the tva, be able to do five really good reps. Supine means lying back facing up is a good base for the diaphragm. Minimum 20% of your body weight to do three sets of 20 for all the other segmental muscles in your core, a minimum of 50 reps. Those 50 reps will allow not only good neural muscular communication, but allow that area to develop more workers, more muscle tissue, which will also add to more neuromuscular communication. So I say add muscle doesn't mean get big and bulky. It just means that if before one of my muscles had five workers of muscle tissue, and I do the activity for that muscle segmentally to tell the body I want to use that muscle, and the body goes, okay, here's 500 more workers. Well, 510 workers I think I said 10 is more than 10, obviously. So you have more workers, more neuromuscular. So your body now knows more of what to use. Now, after getting that base, your muscles are woke. They're woke. And that you can take all these muscles and integrate them into global movements, your seven basic primal movements, squatting, bending, pushing, pulling, twisting, lunging and gait. And then also take those big global movements and adapt them to whatever activities or sports that you do in your life. They all happen in conjunction together. If you don't know where to begin, start with squatting and bending, because both really need to use a core in two different functions. Through squatting, you use your core in a bracing type activity, but it's called the beam phenomenon. So when you squat and you go down, you want your trunk to be like a beam, like a 2x4. So when you move up and down in a squat, you don't have any of the excess force from the squat or any of the weight that you might be holding go into unwanted place, like your spine or your viscera or stuff like that. The beam phenomenon incorporates your pelvic floor, your diaphragm, your TVA and your abs. TVA abs together, your spinal erector muscles, your pec, your lats, your serratus and your posture, pelvic tilt, all those have to work together to produce that beam to work on a squat. The squat is of course, effective for daily life. And then if you do squatting in your activities, the bend pattern or rdl, Romanian deadlift or deadlift, some sort of deadlift, is important to use the core to stabilize the trunk. Because when I bend, if I'm taking up significant weight, I want that core muscles to hold my trunk in place as I go down and up. That core needs to be strong. So starting with those two, the squat and the bend is a good place to begin. The really important thing to remember here is that there is no hack or technique or any type of thing that's going to fully protect your core outside of systematically going through, addressing what you need, segmentally training which core muscles need the most, work through strengthening and through myofascial stretching, integrating them all together in movements that work for you that are functional in your life. Are you looking at strengthening your core and examining things like bracing or hollowing? But it kind of confuses where to begin. Well, let us help you. So in the description below, we've got a link for diagnostic consultation. Just go down there, click the link, choose a time that works for you, then we'll hop on a call to see where you are, where you want to go, and how we can help. If you're not ready for a call, then that's fine too. We have a free resource on how to sustainably train your body. Again, in description you can click on that link, go to a form, fill out your information. You get instant access. Otherwise, I want you to stay tuned for this next video on the Aldoa Method and how can it help with that core training? Don't forget to subscribe, don't forget to like and share this if you found value so others who are interested can see this information. And it is not just working out, it's building a foundation for a better life.