Super-stiffness and Core Function: These Aren't the Droids You're Looking For

SO not only was it my 30th birthday, celebrated with an evening out pounding back fondue with some good friends and family, but George Lucas decided he needed another wing on his Skywalker ranch by pushing another updated copy of Star Wars onto the market. From some of the reviews I’ve seen, people are starting to get pissed off with the tweaks. It’s like Frances Ford Copolla deciding to re-make The Godfather starring cute and cuddly animals, in keeping with his original vision.

On a lighter note, I got a brand-spanking new set of golf clubs this last Thursday as a birthday gift to myself, and was able to break them in yesterday with a short 9 holes with the missus. I figure I need to play another 20 or 30 rounds in order to be good enough to say I suck, and then after that I can just be terrible, and eventually below average.

Top this off with an interesting conversation I had with a client this past week. He’s a well-known Edmonton dance instructor, and was talking about core function during different tasks. He discussed how Shaolin monks would have their abdomens almost hanging due to their almost complete relaxation, yet they could tense up for a very brief period to make their core ridiculously strong to handle impact, create acceleration or anything else thrown at them.

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In a similar vein, dancers are taught to relax their abdomen as much as possible with certain movements and positions in order to get the most range and actually increase their fluidity of motion. Top it off with the fact that most athletic events (including golf) don’t rely on a sustained abdominal contraction for more than about half a second at a time. Even in spinal rehabilitation, full contraction is not recommended until at least more advanced stages or strength and abdominal muscular control have been reached. To gain full mobility out of the pelvis, thoracic cage or shoulder, abdominal tone has to be reduced, which means stiffness could actually impair function at these joints. Many people who perform a coupled contraction of all core muscles also find breathing difficult, which will impair performance more than anything.

Now understandably these options were specifically picked because they fly in the face of the “superstiffness” concept of core function. But because they directly oppose that thought process, they have to be considered. I can see where having a high level of stiffness in the spine, coupled with a large intraabdominal pressure from a forced exhalation against a closed epiglottis (valsalva maneouver) can help with lifting very large loads in things like deadlifts and squats.

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Aside from these examples, do we need to teach super-stiffness when activating the core for different exercises? Another question is much more simple: SHOULD we prescribe this as a way of training the core, knowing that we never use the core this way in anything other than gym-based exercises?

I think training super-stiffness works with loads at or near maximal capacity, but below that, especially in dynamic movements or acceleration activities, the core should function with more of a “responsive stiffness,” which means most of the time the core would be involved with a limited amount of neural signalling, and would contract hard for a brief period as needed, and then relax rapidly to allow for movement around the extremities to take place. If we look at a movement like the power clean, a move that is essentially a rapid deadlift and pull to catch at the shoulders, the spine starts stiff, then has to go through a rapid thoracic extension, then flexion in order to position the catch, and then stiffen to hold the bar, meaning the spine should not be super-stiff throughout, but responsively stiff.

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Yep, that’s a female cleaning pushing almost twice her body weight.

Now I’m not going to say that there’s anything wrong with training super-stiffness for common lifts like deadlifts, squats, etc, but for the rest of the time where the body doesn’t have maximum or near-max loads on it, I’m not convinced super-stiffness is necessary or even beneficial. The abdominal requirements should be guided by the movement and goal outcome of the training so as to get the optimal adaptation, whether that’s heavy deads, olympic lifting, or breaking a board across your gutt.

There’s more than one way to skin a cat when it comes to core training, so while there is nothing wrong with teaching super-stiffness to get the most stability out of your core, there are also limited applications in other activities that would require a super-stiff core. Just as there are a lot of different exercises to train the core, there are different theories and approaches, meaning that a versatile trainer would be best to not get “married” to any one style of core training, but dabble a little in a bunch of different ones, taking what’s needed from each at the right time.