Why the Core is the Key for Athletes

​Without a strong offensive line in football, the quarterback, running-backs, and receivers are rendered defenseless and useless no matter their skill level. Without a strong central pawn formation in chess, your rooks, queen, knights, bishops, and ultimately your king are weak and vulnerable.
Likewise, without a strong core as an athlete, you can’t throw a hard punch, shoot a tight basket, throw a deep pass, jump over a high hurdle, make a tackle, execute a wrestling move, swing a club or bat, hit a ball, or lift a heavy weight. You’ll find inspirational athletes without arms, legs, hands, fingers, toes, hearing, sight, or even a normally functioning brain who do incredible things (check out Shaquem Griffin of the Seattle Seahawks who plays with no left hand), but you’ll never see an athlete be competitive without a torso. Your torso is the center of your power. Without it, you are weak. It doesn’t matter how powerful your legs or arms are. Think about it: you can leg-press, hack squat, or belt squat 1,000+ pounds with ease because your legs just need to focus on pushing the weight, but once you’re forced to stabilize it and get the core involved (as with a normal front or back squat), you’re only about 25-40% as strong on average.

​Your body--especially your central nervous system (CNS)--WILL NOT allow you to lift anything more than your spine can handle. It will shut you down. And, yes, there is the freak exception to this rule where a person can “tough out” the body’s emergency signals and manage to suffer a spinal cord injury mid-lift. However, this is surprisingly extremely rare. The body will fight you to prevent you from getting injured. Wouldn’t you rather have it fight for you?

The only way to do this is to convince your body that your spine is protected. You need to strengthen your “internal belt”--your core. That means your abs and obliques primarily, complementing your lower back. Think about it. An external belt (such as a lifting belt) makes a lift about 20% easier because it helps you to create and maintain intra-abdominal pressure by acting as a “container” that prevents a power leak. Think about a can of soda. When you shake that can of soda, pressure builds up inside of it and the can is actually able to support a decent amount of weight if you place something on it. However, once you open the soda, the internal pressure is lost and the second an external pressure is placed on it, the can will be smashed and its carbonated liquid contents will spill out.
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As Mulan logic goes, once you find your center, you are sure to win. Focus on building a stronger, more rigid, and durable core. Think of this like a strong offensive line in football--the offensive line acts to block for the quarterback and running-backs, allowing them time and space to make big plays. Likewise, a strong central pawn formation in chess allows your more glamorous and powerful pieces like your knights and bishops to safely and more effectively get involved in the game.

CONTROL THE CENTER & YOU CONTROL THE GAME

Consider the battle of Gaugamela between Alexander the Great’s Macedonian army of 40,000 and King Darius III Persian army of 250,000-1,000,000,000. Despite their overwhelming numbers, the Persians greatly weakened their center in several ways that made them susceptible to defeat. First, Darius sent his scythe chariots and elephants forward with little infantry support, allowing them to be trapped and mowed down by the Macedonians. His whole right side was overcommitted to the flanking action, leaving his forces off-balance. Second, he fell for a feint maneuver by Alexander’s cavalry and had his own cavalry leave the center to begin following Alexander to the left in an attempt to keep him on the prepared battlefield. At a critical moment of the battle, Alexander swung left and led his cavalry into the gap created in the Persian center directly at the now-vulnerable King Darius. Despite the incredible size and power of his army, Darius was now vulnerable because he had weakened his center for other pursuits. It was Alexander’s greatest victory. He understood as Darius had failed to that a strong center is key to success. King Darius in this scenario is your unprotected spine due to a weak core.

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CONTROL THE CENTER AND YOU CONTROL THE BATTLE

Let’s look at this in relation to the deadlift, the king of all exercises. When I deadlift, I first take a huge breath, hold it, and brace my core by focusing on contracting it as hard as I can and bringing my rib-cage downward (not forward). You should be tight and shaking. Imagine a tea kettle near the end of its heating cycle with the steam screaming to get out from the top and the kettle itself shaking from the internal forces. This breathing & bracing technique is known as the valsava maneuver. The very best Olympic weightlifters and powerlifters in the world use it.

During the lift, the core acts like a strong pawn formation. The back takes the role of the queen while the legs and glutes take up the role of the two rooks. These are the strongest pieces on the chessboard in comparison to the biggest contributors to your lift. The core, thus, frees the back and legs up to do their thing and work in unison to lift a heavier weight than they could individually. All of these support and protect your king: your spine.

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The valsava maneuver generates and then contains internal pressure similar to a shaken soda can, protecting and supporting the spine

In summary, your core is extremely important and without it you would collapse like a boiled spaghetti noodle. However, I think that people often have a misconception about the core. The core is not just the abs--the six pack--it is the whole center of the torso below the chest including your obliques and, in my opinion, includes the lower-back. Abs, if you haven’t been preached to death about this already, aren’t made in the weight-room, they are made in the kitchen. In other words, you will usually only see them if you eat better and diet. Cardio and resistance training can also help but diet is key. To see your abs, you need to lower your overall body-fat percentage to reveal them. Almost all of us have a layer of fat covering our abs, so getting rid of that fat is the only way to get them to show. Still, the abs and obliques are like any muscle. They can grow and become denser with adaptive stress. So, exercising them is not entirely pointless for aesthetics. Building them may allow them to be seen sooner during a cut.
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The abs and obliques are made up of relatively small muscles that respond well to repetition and recover quite quickly. Herschel Walker became legendary for his 2,000+ sit-ups a day routine that formed the base of his athletic endeavors. It is good to incorporate weighted movements as well from time to time, such as what George Leeman and the late Konstantin Konstantinovs performed. This includes crunches with a barbell or dumbbells, sit-ups with medicine ball tosses, leg-raises with a dumbbell between your legs or ankle weights, and an exercise I like to call “Don’t Die” where you place a weight on your abs while breathing and bracing, holding it there for about 10 seconds. This replicates the breathing and bracing against your belt which you will be doing with heavier lifts. Another thing I like to do to practice bracing the core and strengthening it is very heavy isometric holds such as unracking a heavy weight and holding it for a count of ten.

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