To Strengthen Your Core, Soften Your Belly...? Yes, really.

If you’re like most people I know, you know that having a strong core is important, and that it can help us to avoid back pain and just generally be more awesome at everyday life. 

And, if you’re like most people I know, you might also have a sort of fuzzy idea that a strong core looks like washboard abs, tight and firm, the cover of a Men’s Health magazine. 

The bad news is that those washboard abs are almost impossible to get, let alone maintain, and rely largely on genetics and a diet of baked chicken breast and lettuce. 

The good news (and it’s way better) is that those washboard abs are largely useless in terms of having a strong core, and that being “tight” in the abs is actually a pretty big problem when it comes to real, functional, lift-heavy-stuff, keep-your-back-healthy, kind of core strength. 

What are we even doing with our core? 

“Pull your navel to your spine,” “hollow your belly,” or “engage your core!” we’re told in our exercise classes. Of course, as participants, we assume that the fitness instructor knows what they’re talking about, so we gamely follow along. But not only are these cues not the best way to get strong, they can get in the way of a more optimal way of stabilizing our trunk (preventing the low back pain so many of us are keen to avoid). 

“Core strength” itself is a nebulous term. What are we talking about? The “six-pack” muscles (rectus abdominis), while often the most sought-after look on the beach, are not an effective way to stabilize our trunk. Instead, I prefer to think of the core as a cylinder. The sides consist of transverse adominis, wrapping around us like a girdle. The top of the container is the diaphragm; the bottom is the pelvic floor. 

What all this means is that while you might associate core strength with exercises like crunches or planks, paradoxically, core strength has far more to do with how well we are able to breathe and relax our midsection. To understand this, let’s take a look at a baby: 

Notice that as Baby Ezra engages in a massive feat of core strength (have you tried rolling over without using your arms and legs lately?), nobody is coaching him to “engage his core” or scoop your belly.” Instead, we see him naturally using his abdominal muscles, along with intrabdominal pressure, to roll over. Voila!

Understanding intrabdominal pressure

Here’s a simple video to illustrate the three parts of the core cylinder we’re concerned with: the transverse abdominis (TVA); the diaphragm; and the pelvic floor.

The diaphragm acts both as a muscle of respiration (breathing) and a postural stability muscle.

“Inhalation occurs when the diaphragm contracts. The downward movement of the dome that is the diaphragm creates a negative pressure in the lungs that draws air in. Below the diaphragm, in the abdominal cavity, pressure increases. This increase in pressure pushes down on the pelvic floor, and out on the abdominal wall. By eccentrically contracting the abdominal muscles, we can hold this pressure in, creating intra-abdominal pressure.” —Jennifer Snowdon, Integrative Breathing Therapist

My colleague Dr. Moses Bernard describes this as having the proper amount of air in a tire. “If your tires are half-inflated,” he says, “it doesn’t matter how strong the outer material (think: six-pack abs) is. That tire isn’t going to be very good for your car.”

While you may not remember being a baby and rolling over, you may recall a time you had to pick up a really heavy object. Most of us will instinctively inhale and brace, holding our breath in as we lift it up.

That makes sense: so why isn’t everybody doing it?

Lord, I don’t know. At some point, fitness professionals became obsessed with “hollowing the belly” and “pulling the navel to the spine,” and that became a whole thing that we all did. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that when we “pull our navel to our spine” we are also adhering to normative beauty standards that celebrate a “snatched” waist. I know that in many of my Ashtanga yoga classes, it was encouraged to hold Uddiyana Bandha (a sucking back of the abdominal wall) throughout the entire 90-minute practice. If you give that a try, you’ll see that it’s impossible to achieve intrabdominal pressure if you cannot expand your abdomen.

While the diagram above is far from perfect, I hope you can get a sense for how a pulled-in belly keeps the breath high in the ribs and chest because the diaphragm doesn’t move downward. In addition to its stabilizing benefits, IAP helps keep our digestive system working well, and provides a sense of safety and strength to our brain that translates into our psychoemotional experience. We feel stronger and more stable because we are stronger and more stable.

What does this look like in practice?

In the slowed-down video below, you can see my abdomen/waist expand as I inhale, hingeing to prepare for the movement. I begin my exhale as I initiate the movement, bringing the bag to my chest and stepping the foot onto the bench. You can hear my exhale at the very top of the movement and see how my abdomen draws in (obliques and TVA contracting). I then begin my inhale as I reverse the movement to return to the starting position. Sure, my midriff would look smaller if I sucked it in, but I wouldn’t be nearly as strong or stable— and that’s a tradeoff I’m willing to make.

Breathing and stabilizing in this way might be natural when we are babies, but it can take a lot of un-learning to recover it later in life— especially if we’ve internalized some others’ ideas about how to engage our core, or if we are holding armored patterns of posture and breath in our bodies.

You can start working on this right now, right where you are, by simply starting to release any tension or holding you have in your belly. Can you let it relax, even a little? If this is difficult, you’re not alone— these patterns are often stubborn, and can take time and patience to change.

If you’re curious to learn more about breathing, intrabdominal pressure, and how we can work with the stress and trauma patterns that affect them, Jennifer Snowdon and I would love to have you join us next month for Better Breathing for Trauma- a two hour workshop to recognize adaptive patterns of traumatic stress breathing, and to learn practical, trauma-informed tools to shift into more relaxed breathing states. You can register or read more here.