Optimize Your Core to Maximize Your Performance
We know it’s important, but why is training your core an essential part to athletic performance? Here are the whys behind your core training program and a few assessments to see where you’re really at.
Transfer of Power
Not the kind of transfer of power that occurs during election season, but the kind when you throw, kick, run, punch, shoot, catch yourself before you fall on ice, and basically every other athletic and daily movement under the sun.
Your core is the foundation of your body, much like the foundation of any structure. Imagine a cannon in a giant warship, and a cannon in a tiny little canoe. The warship provides a stronger, more stable surface for the cannon to fire from because of it’s size and command presence in the water. The little dinky canoe on the other hand, takes up no presence in the water at all and will be displaced when the cannon fires.
Your core is the type of ship in the above example. If your core muscle fibers are small and weak, they don’t stabilize your spine and absorb the force of your arms and legs in action, and the power leaks away through your weak foundation as well as forces your joints, ligaments, and skeleton to absorb impact instead. Imagine wood splintering on that canoe when the cannon fires. Your bones are the wood now in this metaphor. Eek.
However, if your core muscles are big and strong like the warship, then they will be able to absorb and then transfer force back into your arms and legs into that game winning goal kick or jump shot, and you will decimate the other boats in the water.
Spinal Bodyguard
Have you been warned about back pain yet? Because if you haven’t, consider this your warning, you do not want it. It is the most crippling, humbling pain a person can ever experience. Your spine is so central to every single movement you take, that if you damage any part of that structural chain, the rest of your body feels it to the point of where even getting out of bed or sleeping itself seems intimidating due to the pain factor.
Strengthen the muscles that do a 360º around your spine, and you will have a happier playing career and, more importantly, better overall quality of life for your entire life.
How Do You Know If You Have a Strong Core?
This perhaps, is the most important part of the article, and will require that you actually go test yourself physically. I hope you’re up for the challenge! Coaches, you can also use this testing battery with your team to establish levels of overall fitness to develop smarter training programs, strategies, and predict and prevent injury using data.
World renown back guru Dr. Stuart McGill (who also has a sweet mustache) and a few of his colleagues use the following four isometric postures to test overall core endurance.
BIERING-SORENSEN TEST
This is an insanely important test because it can actually predict the likelihood of back pain in an athlete in the next year. It’s a little tricky to set up, and if you don’t have a physiotherapist table with three straps for your legs like most of us don’t, you can simply use a Glute Hamstring Developer (GHD) that they have at most gyms.
If you are unable to hold this position for 176 seconds (2:56), it is indicative that you will have back pain within the next year! If you are able to hold longer than 198 seconds (3:18) you will most likely not experience back pain. Between that range of time? Well, it would seem from the research it’s a bit of a grey area.
Curious what age based norms are? Open this link in a new tab to see, you may be very surprised by what you find, especially now knowing the criteria for predicting back pain. Side note, 39% of adults in America experience back pain… so… yeah.
SIDE PLANK (BOTH SIDES)
In my experience, folks typically struggle with side planks more so than front (tall or forearm) planks. This is likely because in every day situations we are moving more forwards, up, and down, than rotationally or sideways.
Your obliques, or the muscles being worked in side planks, are used more with upper body rotation and bending. This type of stress on the core is much more common in sports, and from an injury prevention standpoint, we absolutely want to be bulletproofing these muscles.
“A number of functional core assessment tests can be used to assess the core. Keep in mind these tests do not directly assess the core but speculate a strong or weak core based on how well the participant completes the task”
Though there is no magic number like in the Biering-Sorensen test, a good goal for most people for time held in a side plank is at a minimum 30 seconds. For higher level athletes, a realistic minimum goal is more around 60 seconds.
FOREARM PLANK
A classic test of muscular endurance for pretty much every single core muscle, but primarily the rectus abdominis, or the singular “six pack” muscle that you may have previously thought of as your core.
TURKISH GET UPS
It’s become a point of angst and hilarity among a few groups I currently train and have trained in the past, that the Turkish Get Up will come out of no where in programming, and then hang around for awhile in weeks worth of workouts.
That’s because it’s somewhat of a tricky movement to learn, but once mastered has incredible benefits for core and shoulder stability, as well as systemic coordination. Furthermore, it’s centuries old, and was used as a training technique for soldiers who fell in battle and needed to get back up. Okay, that’s one of many cool reasons to learn this!
STAR EXCURSION BALANCE TEST
Fun fact for you, good balance is a direct correlate with core endurance, so the stronger your core the stronger your balance. Now check this out, if you’re a high school athlete, you will find this very interesting. The Star Excursion Balance Test (SEBT) shown below indicated whether or not high school basketball players had a increased chance of getting hurt in season, and though this study was only on basketball players, I would strongly argue that fact transcends all sports that require balance.
“Plisky et al. (2006) used the SEBT to predict injury in high school basketball players during the competitive season. Athletes who displayed a four-centimeter right–left anterior reach difference were more likely to suffer a lower extremity injury. ”
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