I’ve seen 3 Mums in the past two weeks who have formed the belief (2 of them because they were told by another practitioner) that they need to tuck their butt under and brace their abs when they’re standing to protect their back.
Huh?!?
Our ‘core’ is made up of LOTS of muscles (between 5 and 30 depending on who you ask 😉 and we don’t need to hold them on all the time!
We need to learn how to use our core muscles to:
💮work as a team to manage intra-abdominal pressure
💮build enough strength to meet the demands of what we need to do
💮provide stability and confidence with movement, not just with standing still
We also need to remember that there is quite a difference in demand on our core muscles between standing tall, leaning over the kitchen sink and deadlifting 60kg 🚫We don’t need 80% effort for a 10% activity!
When women, especially those with persistent or recurrent pain, are given messages that they need to ‘brace’ more to avoid pain, it can feed fear avoidance, increase anxiety and often leads to more tension and pain.
On top of all of this, most people are WAY overdoing it when they ‘brace’ anyway! If you want to see how I teach most people basic core cylinder activation, please get in touch.