Should we Brace For Core Stability?

Let’s say you’re interested in building a bullet-proof core, rocking a six-pack for the New Year or maybe even trying to recover from some sort of horrendous low back injury. Looking on a lot of the fitness websites around the interwebz, you may be prone to follow the common advice and “brace” the midsection, which means contracting all the muscles simultaneously and in relatively equal proportions to create external stability for the lumbar spine. Sounds pretty hot, right?

But what if it’s wrong?

Before I get angry comments, let me reassure you, I use bracing with some of my clients, particularly when lifting maximal loads or on movements where there’s a great deal of shear stress to the lumbar region (deadlifts, chops, that kind of thing), but for the vast majority of the people out there, they need to have a “reactive core” instead of simply a taught band of steel ready to bust. It’s simply a tool to use when it is called for.

There’s a lot of research out there showing how beneficial bracing is to spinal stability, most of it completed by one Dr. Stuart McGill. Conversely, there’s a lot of studies that show it ins’t all that beneficial at all, primarily coming from a couple of facilities in New Zealand or Australia. A recent study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research looked at the lumbar spine range of motion during typical exercises like a bird dog, side bridge, pushup, squat and shoulder front raise, and found there wasn’t a consistent balanced increase in muscle activation during bracing for the different exercises, and during the quadruped exercise there was actually an increase in lumbar range of motion when bracing compared performing the exercise without bracing, and especially when compared to the control group (who decreased their lumbar range of motion during bracing).

Maybe it comes down to a coaching cue when teaching bracing. For years, I personally though bracing was like tightening against someone trying to puch you in the gut. That lead to me bracing predominantly with my rectus, pulling me into a posterior tilt and some kyphosis. Regardless of what you may think, chicks don’t dig that Mr. Burns look. As a result, my bracing was less than adequate, and may have lead to me developing my own back injury.

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Another downside to bracing is that it can impair breathing mechanics. Without the ability to expand and flex the abdomen, the diaphragm can’t contract properly, meaning you’re only going to be breathing through your scalenes and intercostals which collectively don’t offer too much. This is a common point when a client is squeezing hard and says they are having trouble trying to hold their abs and breathe at the same time. Anyone who’s read this blog for any length of time knows I take breathing pretty seriously, so if there’s something negatively impacting breathing mechanics, it’s not going to fly for long.

Is bracing good for short duration high load situations? No doubt. If I have someone ripping off a max weight deadlift, you’d better believe they’re going to be squeezing the hell out of their stomach. They’ll also be breathing every once in a while, or else they’re going to end up like this guy.

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In other disciplines such as yoga and meditation, they teach that breathing is more important, and the only way to breathe deeply is to completely relax the abdomen, something we tend to have difficulty with, especially in a posture-deprived society that spends more hours in front of a computer than in a gym.

10 years ago, drawing in the abdomen was all the craze, and the transverse abdominis was the new hotness in the fitness world, responsible for everything from world record athletic performances to increased sperm count. Then the pendulum swung the other way and everyone said that it was terrible for you.

I would argue that in a lot of vertical jumping, contralateral movements (running, sprinting, skating), throwing, hitting any any other athletic movement that there would be a moment of core stability, sort of like a quick pulse, This is pretty clear when we look at how the quadruped actually increased lumbar motion when braced, a movement that involves hip & shoulder extension, plus contralateral rotation  Additionally, holding a sustained contraction would be very inefficient, resulting in fatigue related issues along the way.

When I was training a fitness competitor a while ago, she was having trouble doing split transitions while up on her hands. She was tensing up to make sure she had the stability and control, but the tensing meant she wasn’t able to get the mobility needed to pull off the move. I suggested she change how she was breathing and roll into the movement more versus lean into it with a stiff torso, and her legs flew through the movement easily. The tensing reduced mobility through the pelvis, limiting her range of motion.

This definitely isn’t a post bashing bracing as a way of training the abs, because it’s definitely effective. It’s merely trying to point out that there are pitfalls to using any training method across the board, this being one of them.It’s still great to use, just not for everything and in all circumstances of core training.