I’d like to invite you to a thought experiment: what if you don’t need to brace your core?

I know, I know. It’s controversial, and you might even base your entire practice around abdominal bracing. You can do whatever you want, but hear me out.

You won’t find a single hunter-gatherer who braces or pulls their belly button to their spine. It’s a made-up cue in a modern world where people misunderstand movement. There aren’t any studies on indigenous people who brace their cores because you won’t find anyone who fits the criteria, but there are plenty of photos and videos of them, and none suck it in. Photographic evidence is enough for me. (Google “Hadzabe,” if you’re curious. I’d like to avoid any potential copyright issues by posting photos here.)

Next, how many millions of mammals made it from fawn to frailty without fretting even once about their cores?

(All of them.)

Every animal on earth does not choose to brace their cores, and they’re doing just fine—aside from us fucking up the planet ‘n’ all.

Animals have different skeletons, but consider that many of them flex and extend their spines to great effect. If vertebral movement were so cancerous, aquatic and quadrupedal animals—that propel themselves with their spines—wouldn’t exist. Aquatic animals have disks and vertebrae too, you know, and get around solely by spinal motion. Our spines aren’t so different that we should have the pandemic of back pain, nor the fear that spinal motion is dangerous.

The frequency of human back injuries has more to do with user error than a flaw in our system because evolution doesn’t repeat such blatant mistakes across an entire species. It would be a devastating design flaw for Mother Nature to make us dependent upon a conscious contraction to survive. She’d have to be so evil to say, “I’m bored of normal evolution. Let’s see if Homo Sapiens survive when I make them have to contract their cores and squeeze their glutes to do anything.”

You’re the dazzling product of hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Hundreds of millions of years! You’ve had countless ancestors beta-testing your bipedal body for hundreds of thousands of years in much more rugged and adverse environments than your four-walled home, suburban habitat, and pristinely flat gym floor. They had more pressing things to worry about than what their abdominals did, and still, the human race thrived.

Belly Button To Spine

How does a lumberjack chop down a tree? He makes that maple pull its “belly button to spine” with his axe.

Rather than sucking in and making, uh, whatever shape that is, human tum-tums should be cylindrical because they are load-bearing structures. Cylinders are nature’s structure of choice, especially for vertical loading. (See tree trunks, molars, and femurs.)

Imagine the legs of a flamingo and a rhino. The chubby unicorn has wider thighs because it weighs more and creates huge forces. When Mother Nature crafts heavy and powerful things, she widens their cylinders. That’s why she gives each tree a ring on its birthday.

Cylinders are also best suited for multidirectional forces; trees are still a great example. Their round trunks allow for the most structural integrity when winds blow from the east today, west tomorrow, and Mordor the day after that.

What do humans do that mimics wind on trunks? Sports. Every sport I can think of requires human torsos to create and attenuate forces in all directions. Okay, maybe not curling. Anyhow, the safest and most powerful shape is a cylinder.

Consider:

Cylinders: spines, animal torsos, femurs, humeri, trees,
Not cylinders: some modern humans, dented cans, trees being chopped

What To Do Instead?

1) Unlearn

So, what should you do with your gut instead?

If you were at Apiros, I’d guide you to let it all hang out when resting, standing, and walking. When you’re active, focus on the activity. No conscious contraction is required. Believe it or not, your muscles will work without your vigilance. That’s kind of their whole schtick.

“Muscles!”

[Vigorous jazz hands.]

“They work without your conscious choice! Buy now at the low, low price of get moving!”

When walking, you don’t think Contract quad, pull hamstring, turn on flexor digitorum longus, use multifidus, and yet you don’t fall, and those muscles fire. The same is true for your core muscles. They work to varying degrees depending on what you’ve done, what you’re doing, and your positions. Unlearning constraining core contractions becomes a short-term focus for you to move until you return to a more natural state. Once there, you just do whatever it is you want to do. No internal focus necessary.

If you need to brace your core to feel okay, go ahead. But how’s that going for you? Do you feel how you want? How’s your breathing? Do you move how you want? What about that stubborn hip or backache that just won’t go away?

2) Bone Position

Focus on where your bones are positioned instead of what your muscles do, and here’s why: you can have the strongest core contraction in the world, and it won’t necessarily protect your spine nor change its position. Let me show you.

Contract your core.

Harder.

Despite your effort, your spine didn’t move much—unless you intended it to. Your bracing can’t protect you or make you more athletic if you regularly put your spine in awful positions.

Furthermore, what’s to say that you and I contract our cores the same way? My history of volleyball changed my core muscles—I rotate right like a dream and left like Derek Zoolander. (I’m working on becoming an ambiturner.)

Maybe you think contracting your core is doing an abdominal crunch, in which case you moved your spine. How you and I interpret and execute that cue could be as different as Loki and Thor.

Now if we’re both trying to make our torsos into a specific shape, we can agree upon that reality. It either is that shape, or it isn’t. And you either have the capacity for that position, or you don’t. If you lack the capacity for that position, you can guess what will likely happen.

3) “Totally Tubular, Man”

When making your core a cylinder, close the physical gap between your skin and waistband. Look for dents in your obliques and fill them out by breath or movement. You’ll be substituting one cue for another, but this one’s got legs, literally. One study found that abdominal bracing during jumping increased ground reaction forces and decreased how much legs bend. (Meaning you’d land as well as I turn left.) Eventually, you won’t have to think about belly breathing, and your stomach would return to what it did when you were a kid—cylindrical.

Explore and tinker with your body’s positioning and breath. Tilt or turn your pelvis, rotate your ribs, or move an arm; mold your body as if it were living clay—lighter intensities and slower movements help you find new positions. Seriously, as light and effortless as possible.

If you wanna turn it up a notch, hold a kettlebell on a shoulder and see what happens down below. Your muscles will contract into a cylindrical shape once you find the right movement for you to do so.

Don’t take my word for it. Go back to bracing if you want. But I encourage you to try this cylinder stuff, just for a second, just to see how it feels. Exploratory movement and awareness are your primary and best tools to get the outcome you want.

4) Awareness

The next thing to do is become aware. Notice that you might have a great spine position but still hollow out your core. We cannot assume that one thing will lead to the other. (Good god, we do that so much.) You need to ensure that your spine is in a good position and that you unlearn any corset-like behavior.

*(Notice my spine position is the same, but the way my core has contracted is vastly different. You can even see how my back muscles change when I pull my belly button to spine.)*

Eventually, a full cylinder should become unconscious, and that’s the point. The last thing I want you to do is to worry about the shape of your torso as often as you worried about your bracing—that’s substituting one worry for another. I want you to trust your body and your training and go play.

If you want to know what I really mean by “good position,” you’ll want to read part two of this post, and the best way to do that is by subscribing. (If you already have, thank you.)

— AE

References

Campbell, Amity, Kevin Kemp-Smith, Peter O'Sullivan, and Leon Straker. "Abdominal bracing increases ground reaction forces and reduces knee and hip flexion during landing." Journal of orthopaedic & sports physical therapy 46, no. 4 (2016): 286-292.

Reconsidering Core Bracing: Challenging Conventional Wisdom for Optimal Performance