Six Core Superpowers

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Introduction

For full mastery, you need to know, not just follow.

There are not many things as important for feeling strong and healthy as having a body that can move well. I believe that movement is life, and death is the process of losing our movement. Our body’s movement is entirely dependent on our spine, and the core system which supports it.

I’ve spent the last 7 years obsessing over how the core works, and how we can get the most from it. I’ve discovered what we must master if we want to move like athletes until the last day — and I’m going to explain. But before I do, I first want us to get on the same page with a few ideas; like what the core is, and how it works. That’s what this essay is about. The next one will cover the practical steps.

Through studying countless books and teachers, hundreds of case studies, and obsessing over it in my own movement — I’ve managed to combine the best understandings of the spine and core, into an elite level understanding of how it works — and I’ve made this knowledge simple.

I’ve also managed to hone in on one single skill that if you develop it, your spine will not only be safe, but you’ll have the foundation of a powerful core. LET’S GET TO IT.

What should the core do?

The spine is structurally positioned at the centre of our body, and functionally at the centre of our movement.

The spine is the centre of our universe — four layers of abs plus the muscles across our back and spine.

Imagine your spine without any muscles? Just a balancing stack o’ bones — without any muscles it would flop over like a slinky. Now, imagine your body without muscles — the only thing connecting the upper and lower halves is that same slinky spine!

Now, imagine your body without muscles — the only thing connecting the upper and lower halves is that same slinky spine!

Yes, I am saying that if our muscles aren’t operating properly, then our skeleton is unstable at its centre, and practically disconnected between its top and bottom!

Guess what — most of our bodies are functioning like this. And this shouldn’t be surprising because we have spent more time in this life relying on the backrest of our chairs than we have supported our own spine.

Throughout our pre-school, primary, middle and high school, college and university — throughout our body’s development we have spent more of our waking hours not supporting our spine than we have spent supporting it.

So now, for most of us, the floppy slinky spine must fend for itself, and our top and bottom halves find it difficult to have a meaningful relationship. Observe how your spine and other people’s spine’s move — especially the lower back — flopping from extension to flexion, with very little time spent supported in neutral.

Even if you have an incredible six-pack, and you can do thousands of sit-ups at a time, I assure you, it is pretty likely that the only time your core is firing is when you force it to fire during your ab workout, and even then it's not nearly optimal. Keep reading — your body will be grateful.

Core Abilities (Superpowers)

In summary, the CORE has three main functions,

You need the wires to be equally spaced apart to have stability from all sides. And you need equal tension to balance the forces. You can’t think, well I want to make this system stronger so I’m going to increase the tension in one or two wires — it would throw off the balance, and the stability of this beautifully simple system. The risk we face from not having this kind of stability are buckling at the spine’s joint’s, just like we imagined the fishing rod would. This becomes a habit — we buckle certain joints of our spine many thousands of times, causing the wear and tear that eventually creates injuries.

Spine Support

Firstly, to support the spine. Professor Stuart McGill uses a visual analogy to explain how the many structures which form our core — muscles and other connective tissues — act like a guy-wire system. He tells us to picture a fishing rod upright in the ground — if you had to place any load on it, it would buckle immediately. But now picture 3 guy-wires connected to the tip, and another three halfway up. The 3 wires at the tip, and the three wires midway up, MUST be equally spaced apart and have equal tension! The sketch below is a 2D side-view version.

Connect Upper & Lower Bodies

The next major function of our core is to connect the upper and lower halves of our body. Without the core acting to create structure your body will remain disconnected from bottom to top. Visualise the pelvis as a right-side-up bowl, and the rib-cage as an upside-down bowl. Both of these bowls have rims that are flush with the edge of our torso, and the only thing connecting these two bowls, besides from the slinky and inherently unstable spine at the back, is the core muscles in between. If these muscles do not engage, then these two bowls do not operate with coherence. Additionally, there is a break in the kinetic chain of the body — forces cannot travel between the top and bottom.

Spinal Decompression

Another incredibly important benefit of healthy core muscle activity is a little abstract, but no less important. Let me try and explain.

All of the muscles of the core, when activated, increase the compressive forces on our lower spine. This could overload our spine, especially when combined with large external loads as well. But when we activate the core, it includes our diaphragm. The diaphragm divides our torso into two halves, top and bottom. When the diaphragm is activated it compresses the lower portion, creating an intra-abdominal pressure (IAP). This pressure acts as a fulcrum to decompress and counteract the loads on the lower spine.

Stabilise Upper Body

Our rib cage acts as the base on which our shoulder girdle mounts, and our shoulder girdle serves as the base for our arms. The problem is, our rib cage needs to be stabilised to give our shoulder girdle and arms a stable foundations. Because our rib cage is built on an inherently unstable spine, the only way to stabilise it is to connect it to the lower body through the core.

Connecting the rib cage and pelvis connects the upper and lower body, as discussed, which allows the whole body to act in unison. But it does more than that, it creates stability for each of the limbs too.

Stabilise Lower Body

The same is true for our legs — our pelvis serves as the foundation of our legs. But the only thing our pelvis is connected to is our unstable spine unless we connect it to our ribcage through our core.

Facilitate Breathing

Breathing could be considered our most important movement, the one we will die of within a few minutes of not performing. Breathing is a movement, and just like any other movement, it is driven by muscles. Muscles which form part of our core.

We have been discussing our core through the lens of body movement, but we cannot forget the role our core plays in breathing movement. As we master our core for the sake of bodily stability and movement, we cannot leave behind our breathing. We must learn how to breathe optimally in general, and how to breathe simultaneously while we use the core during bodily movement.

Most of us have lost our ability to breathe properly AND we have lost the ability to use the core for movement. We must retrain our ability to perform these two functions individually and simultaneously.

In Summary

Improvements in these functional abilities of our core and spine results in a profound and system-wide improvement in movement. Loads and stresses are more appropriately distributed through joints and tissues. This is most tangibly experienced as a reduction in pain and injury, and an increase in efficiency and performance. This directly and radically changes the prognosis and timeline of ageing for most modern humans.

Instead of being developed for its purpose — movement — our core has been shaped by sitting, the anti-movement.

We have lost core and spine function, creating endless losses in performance and huge increases in the likelihood of pain and injury. The region of our body with the most potential has become a burden.

In the next post I will discuss how to start developing the core with these functional priorities in mind.