6 Muscles That Will Radically Change The Way You Move

hi friends Kathy Madeo back with another video this one all about what it means to engage your core and how doing so can radically change your yoga practice if you feel clumsy in your yoga practice or you've ever wondered how some of those yoga practitioners just Glide with Grace and ease from one pose to the next then this video is definitely for you you might think it has to do with being flexible but learning how to move with control and ease has less to do with being super flexible and more to do with learning how to engage your core in this video I'm going to share with you exactly what it means to engage your core and how engaging your core in your yoga poses and the transitions between yoga poses can radically change your yoga practice and the way you move off of your mat let's get started [Music] foreign foreign [Music] they're most likely talking about turning on your transverse abdominis muscle this is our deepest muscle of the core it looks and works like a core set it basically wraps around your entire torso and cinches in at the waist the interesting thing about the TVA is that it doesn't need any movement to engage most of our other muscles will need the bones to move to actually shorten the muscle but the TVA is kind of like a class all of its own so this is why you can actually engage your core while doing a lot of movements that don't necessarily look like ab crunches or core work so I want you to place a few of your fingers two fingers below your navel and two fingers roughly out to the side and then just gently press into your abdomen and do a short cough do you feel a kind of tightness right there as you cough that's your transverse abdominis now the transverse abdominis is much bigger here but it's a little bit easier to feel here and if you need to move some tissue around or anything please put those fingers deeply into your stomach when you're transverse abdominis is engaged it feels like a kind of bracing like something is just holding all of the contents and the Torso in and basically what's happening is the transverse abdominis is pressurizing this area to protect the spine when we do big movements let's say we're picking up a heavy box or something like that another one of its function is to move our limbs so the arms and the legs with Force so we can just throw a ball out of our hand right but if we initiate the movement from our core we're going to get a lot more power were coming out of that ball right but let's see this in action in our yoga practice take a very common transition that we have especially in our Vinyasa classes where we have down downward facing dog is a kind of base and we're going to step the foot in between the hands to move up to any standing posture most people that haven't learned how to engage their core will feel a little bit clumsy or unable to do this transition with Grace especially as they try to step the foot in between the hands and lift their torso up but now if we look at this transition and simply add in core engagement you'll notice that it's a much more controlled movement that looks like it's done with more ease you'll also notice there's a lot more stability in the transition but your TVA alone does not make up your core there are a lot of muscles in your torso that help you move let's take the rectus abdominis commonly known as those washboard abs are rectus abdominis which are our most superficial front core muscles along with the TVA are responsible for core compression namely just bringing your torso into your thighs so any movement that we have like stepping the foot in between the hands if you notice that's a core compression move the chest is going in towards the thigh or take any forward fold in the yoga practice that is again a compression move so the stronger and the more engaged we can get our rectus abdominis as well as using the transverse abdominis in these movements the deeper our forward folds so let's watch this stepping the foot forward in between our hands from downward facing dog one more time thinking about this we're essentially taking a number of poses here we're going from a three-legged downward facing dog and then we're pulling the knee into the chest and that's where we're using our rectus abdominis our transverse abdominis also of course our hip flexors to flex the thigh in towards the chest and then from there we're placing the foot in between the hands from there we rise up and we're using our back core muscles there to lift the torso up and basically extend the spine straight up our spinal Erectors basically apply this concept to most of our yoga poses let's take the external and internal obliques two more core muscles that work together to both laterally or side Bend our torso or rotate the spine into twists now these muscles on both sides of the Torso kind of work together so when one side shortens the opposite side stretches and let's take a side Bend so again I can side Bend and that's going to just happen automatically or I can actively engage and shorten one side of the obliques to stretch and lengthen the opposite side even more same with twists of course I can just kind of take my hands and pull my torso and rotate my spine to twist but you'll notice I'm not getting as deep as if I recruit those external and internal obliques that are responsible for rotating the spine of course we have core muscles on our back side so we have two main groups of muscles one is the multifidus that kind of run along the vertebrae and the other is their Rector spinae which are three big bands of muscles that run along the spine and they both work to keep us upright so their spinal extensors so really in all of our back bends we need to engage these muscles in order to extend the spine now if we take a pose like Locus pose which is more of a gentle back been done in this way but it's really a great yoga pose to both help strengthen the back and prepare your body for back ends now I can come into Locust pose here by just lifting my arms and my legs but if I use my back core muscles and I engage them and I activate them you'll notice I get much more of a lift so let's translate how we would use our back core muscles in a yoga transition let's go back to that downward facing dog stepping our foot forward so again we already know we're going to engage those front core muscles as we pull the thigh into the chest and place the foot in between the hands but as we begin to lift the torso up we can call upon those back core muscles to help lift up with control and then as we come up we can brace our transverse abdominis a little bit to help stabilize everything so this again is one of those transitions that is so commonly done throughout your yoga practice and if you can begin to really turn on these core muscles you'll begin to move with so much more control one more muscle to consider in our core muscles is the pelvic floor now the pelvic floor is a diamond band shape of muscles at the base