[00:00:00] Welcome to Pilates Students' Manual, everything you want to know about Pilates in one place. I'm Olivia, and I'll be your host. Jump in the conversation on Instagram @pilatesstudentsmanual and be sure to subscribe for updates on new episodes. Let's learn something new together.

Hello, hello everybody. Welcome back. I've got a super cool episode for you today, especially if you are an anatomy nerd like myself. We will be diving into "what is the core?" today. What does it do? Why does it matter? All of those things. 

You may have seen articles saying things about core conditioning [00:01:00] or strengthening your core or that Pilates is about core strength, the benefits of a strong core, or even heard about the correlation between having a strong core and a decrease in back pain. Those are like all good things to like, read about and see. And you're like, Oh, Hey. 

But what is the core? That is a great question. And everyone kind of has their own definition of it. There are things like the deep core, which I'm going to be talking about the most today, which I think we're actually dealing with the most in Pilates.

We are of course, focusing on balanced muscle development, but our deep core muscles are especially important. And I agree with some definitions, like I'll be talking about the Pilates deep core definition. And I agree with some of the core definitions. Like obviously I think that the Pilates core definition is pretty spot on, but there are other definitions of core that I don't agree with. I mean, this whole thing is my opinion, but let's talk about it. What is it? 

If you are a visual learner, [00:02:00] Google is your friend. I'm going to try to describe as best as I can using words and giving you bony landmarks or ways that you can visualize it. But if you need a visual representation, any website that is like medical is going to be really helpful, anything labeled is going to be really helpful. I love the book, Pilates Anatomy. I think that it is super helpful in terms of visualizing not only the muscles, but what they're doing in exercises. So that can be useful. I have linked that book in my show notes if you want to check it out. You also have a body. So it's nice to be able to kind of know what's going on in your body and also feel it for yourself. 

Joe, who is of course, Joe Pilates. Whenever I mention Joe on the show, it's always Joseph Pilates. He called our deep core muscles, the powerhouse, and in Pilates, the exercises always start from strength in the powerhouse, and then we move from there.

So we start with that [00:03:00] strong, deep core. And then we can add on whether it's more limbs or choreography or coordination or balance, but we always start with an awareness and then strength in our core. 

From a Pilates perspective, the core is the physical center of your body. It includes your abdomen, your low back and your pelvis. You can also visualize it as a canister that goes from the bottom of your rib cage to the bottom of your pelvis, and then like wraps around there. So I like to visualize it as a canister. That makes sense to me. 

When those muscles are engaged properly, they're stabilizers and they allow movement to happen easier in your limbs, specifically in your legs, because we're talking about lower body, but they're stabilizers. They are creating stability for us. If you think of exercises that you may have done on the mat, things like dead bug or bird dog, those are exercises- I mean all Pilates exercises- [00:04:00] but those specific exercises, you have this really steady center point. And then you're moving your limbs independently without changing your center, your core. 

That's not unique to Pilates, lots of forms of movement and exercise will emphasize having that strong steady center. But again, this is a Pilates podcast. That's what we're going to talk about. 

Anatomy nerds, welcome. This is for you. We are going to be talking about some of the muscles, actually all of the muscles, involved in the deep core of our bodies.

The muscles of that muscular canister are the diaphragm, your transverse abdominis, your pelvic floor, and your multifidus and some horizontal internal oblique fibers. So I'm going to go about describing these muscles. And again, Google if you'd like. 

Your diaphragm is a muscle that is like a dome at the bottom of your rib cage. It drops actively when you inhale and it inverts and expands towards your belly. So it kind of goes at that bottom of the rib cage and that's actually what causes your [00:05:00] inhalation is. As that muscle drops, it creates a vacuum in your lungs and that allows you to pull air in effortlessly. And then as that muscle relaxes and it draws back in towards your lungs and it reverted to its natural state, that's how it presses air out of your lungs.

You can feel your diaphragm a couple ways. If you take a super deep inhalation, you might feel a little bit of a tightness, right at the bottom of the ribcage and a stretch. That's your diaphragm expanding because you are asking it to stretch beyond how it normally stretches. When you take that really deep breath, you might feel a stretch there.

And most likely you felt it because that's what causes hiccups like a spasm in your diaphragm is what causes those sharp intakes of breaths and that kind of annoying noise that goes with them. That's your diaphragm as well. That diaphragm muscle is the top of our canister. 

Going into the front and sides of your canister. We've got to talk about our transverse [00:06:00] abdominis, which is also called your TA. You might see things calling it your TA as well. It is like a muscular corset. It's the inner most muscle of your abdominal wall. And your abdominal wall, just like it sounds is the wall of muscle that stops your organs from kind of falling out. So if you think of your rib cage as holding your lungs and heart and place, your abdominal wall is what's holding all of the other stuff that is not encased by your rib cage in place. Transverse abdominis is the deepest of those muscles. It wraps around horizontally and it kind of pulls in when it contracts, it pulls in towards your center.

Your transverse abdominis is like, if you think of competitive weightlifters where they're lifting obscenely heavy amounts of weight, they have that belt that wraps around their midsection. That is like an externalized transverse abdominis. Your transverse abdominis is just like that belt that's like holding everything in, but it's on the inside.

And for most of [00:07:00] our, hopefully all of our, daily activities, we don't need a weight belt. If you're lifting heavy things consistently, you might like a weight belt so that you get that extra support, but our transverse abdominis does that support for us. 

Your internal obliques do a similar stabilizing thing. Your internal obliques are a muscle that is right on top of your transverse abdominis. A little bit more superficial, a little bit more towards your skin. They run from the bottom of your rib cage, diagonally down towards your hip. And as they're making their way down, some of those fibers are horizontal and those horizontal fibers do that same kind of drawing in tightening corsetting action. Sometimes I'll call it like a saran wrap sensation that kind of tightening pulling in. You can't really feel your internal obliques or your transverse abdominis with your fingers in the same way you can't feel your diaphragm. 

But you can feel them contract when you exhale completely and you imagine a draw string drawing from between [00:08:00] your front hip point. So if you think of those hip bones, The technical term for them as the anterior superior iliac *spine, but they're your hip bones on the front of your body to the casual hip bone haver. 

However, if you imagine a draw string between those hip points and when you exhale completely, you draw that draw string in towards the center. You may notice that your low belly there flattens and then drops toward your spine. That is your transverse abdominals, engaging internal oblique is kind of doing that on the sides, but it's that same idea of drawing in. 

At the bottom of your canister is your pelvic floor and your pelvic floor is kind of like your diaphragm just at the bottom that creates this muscular hammock, that kind of is like right above your pelvis. And it lifts your organs away from your pelvis. So it's like this little muscular hammock. It is composed of several muscles. Individually, they're not super important, but together what they do is keep your organs [00:09:00] lifted, engaging your pelvic floor muscles creates this sensation of buoyancy, this lifting kind of in and up sensation.

And it can be really difficult to isolate your pelvic floor because you have to work really slowly and you have to pay attention to what you're feeling, because a lot of us don't have the same connection to the muscles of our pelvis that we have, like in our hands, right? The fine motor skill that we have in our hands is much greater than what we have in our pelvic floor. Luckily, in Pilates, we are moving slowly. We are moving with a concentrated effort, so you can find and isolate those pelvic floor muscles in Pilates, should you be interested in doing that. 

Lastly, the back of our canister here is your multifidus, which is a spine muscle. Spine muscles, technically, just like your internal obliques. You have one on each side and it runs right alongside your spinous processes on both sides of your spine. So the spinous processes, if you reach and feel your back, those [00:10:00] bumps, those bones, are called the spinous processes of your vertebrae. And on either side of those bumps, running vertically, we've got your multifidus. 

And your multifidus is a muscle that as the other muscles wrap around your torso, like your transverse abdominis and your internal oblique, they're all connecting into this mesh of muscle at your spine. Everything could just kind of like *blargh sound* in there, everything meshes together. And part of what your transverse abdominis, your internal obliques and your multifidus are doing is they're finding a co-contraction so that you're maintaining an even tension. So you're trying to figure out how much abdominal contraction do you need to create tension on your multifidus, which will then stabilize your spine. Again, deep core, all about stabilizing. So the multifidus is the muscle that just is at the back of that canister. So those are the muscles that are all about that deep core stabilizing. 

I do want to just throw in [00:11:00] that you should take all of this with a grain of salt. The way we look at muscles is as discrete units that they originate at one point and insert in another point, and that they only perform certain jobs, but our bodies are way messier than that. They're way more complicated than that. And muscles, you know, combine into other muscles and muscle fibers in the same muscle can do opposite things. If you think of your upper and your lower trapezius muscle, they do different things. They do the opposite things, but we still call it our trapezius. So it's really arbitrary how we've decided to name things and what the muscles do.

So it's super useful to have names and have ways to talk about these muscles. But as you know, as a Pilates enthusiast, whether or not you know the names of these muscles, where they attach, what they do, you can still enjoy Pilates and they will continue to work whether or not you have a name for them. But the name can be useful. 

Coming up after the break, we've got more questions. Are there more cores [00:12:00] that we need to worry about? What do your core muscles do? We've talked about stabilizing a little bit. We'll go a little deeper. And why does it matter? Let's talk about it.

Hey, there. Enjoying the episode? Me too. You should definitely subscribe so you get notifications about new episodes. And if you love it, maybe leave me a review. That would be awesome. Thanks for sharing the Pilates love. Now back to the show.

Are there more cores? It depends. The idea of the core can be interpreted more broadly than the deep core muscles that I talked about before the break. Joe called those muscles that I talked about before the break, your deep core, your powerhouse, right? And they stabilize, they stabilize your [00:13:00] spine and your pelvis.

That's where we start in Pilates. We always want to work proximal, the closest to the center. So that's the first thing that we're kind of concerned with. You'll notice that a lot of times in mat classes you'll start lying down because that takes you out of gravity. Gravity is no longer compressing your spine.

And it also gives you feedback so that you can feel where neutral spine is. When we're standing up, we're just in space. It can be difficult to visualize where you are in space, but when you're lying down, you can feel the back of the pelvis on the mat. You can feel the back of the ribcage in the mat. You can feel the back of your head and you can feel into those curves of the spine.

So when those deep core stabilizers work properly, when we're able to be in neutral or be in whatever shape we really want to be in, all work that we do, whether it's Pilates, whether it's golf, whether it's basketball becomes easier. We can work more efficiently because that deep core is really stabilizing us.

The core definitions can get larger. Joe also talks about a secondary powerhouse that is your shoulder girdle [00:14:00] and its primary purpose is to stabilize your shoulders. And that makes sense, the same way we want to stabilize right where our legs attach, we also want to stabilize where our arms attach. And that would be the secondary powerhouse. When you master that primary powerhouse, then you can start working on that secondary powerhouse as well. And then when you use both of those powerhouses together, you have a stabilized and strong torso. 

So some definitions of the core might be everything from your shoulders to your pelvis. I've even heard bigger definitions that it's all the way from your shoulders to your knees. I feel like that's a little bit too big, but whatever. But again, it's that idea that when you have those muscles stabilizing, you, you can perform all other tasks with a greater amount of ease. 

Anyone who's had a shoulder injury, knows that if you don't stabilize your shoulders using your back muscles, using those secondary powerhouse muscles, it's really easy to have an injury. And a lot of the PT work that you did coming out of your shoulder injury may be around stabilizing those muscles, [00:15:00] finding those muscles, and then finding that correct amount of tension. We do it in Pilates all the time, ideally to the point that it becomes second nature because having strong core muscles and balanced muscle development is something that we do in Pilates, but we do it in Pilates for our life.

Because, whether you're picking up a dumbbell or a grocery bag or a child, you want to be able to do those things. You want to be able to move freely and with ease. Joe calls it having spontaneous zest and pleasure for life. And that's why we do Pilates is so that our overall quality of life improves.

It's really easy to make machine metaphors when we're talking about muscles, but I'm going to really resist doing that because our body is so much more than just what it does and how it does it. Our body is more than the sum of its parts. What it does, the way it moves is important, especially within the realm of Pilates.

But I just want to throw out [00:16:00] again, disclaimer, that for everything that we know about our bodies, we're learning new things about it that is totally changing what we had thought before. We're finding that emotions and trauma can live in our tissues. We know that what we think impacts how we move, that if you believe that you can, or you can't do something, it often becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. What we eat is important, how we live is important. The experiences that we've had before are all very, very important. 

The good news is any habits that we have, any stuff that we have going on, whether it is a clear muscle trauma or something, perhaps a little bit deeper than that, is that Pilates can definitely help us get into our bodies and work with where we are and then get stronger and go beyond our own expectations.

So give your body a hug, tell it that you love it. It has an excellent track record. [00:17:00] Everything that you have ever encountered in your life, you're on the other side of. It's doing a great job.

Thanks for stopping by for today's episode of Pilates Students' Manual. Subscribe to follow the podcast and join the community of Pilates lovers on  Instagram @pilatesstudentsmanual, you can reach out to me there with questions, comments, or feedback, or send me an email at [email protected].

If you learn something new today, share this episode and the Pilates love. The adventure continues. Until next time. [00:18:00]