How to Engage Your Core

Coaches are often heard telling athletes to do something with their core - something along the lines of:

  • Brace your core!

  • Engage your abs!

  • Stable midline!

All of these phrases mean the same thing: Engage your core. All refer to the action of tightening your core musculature to stabilize or brace the body for a particular activity, but what does it mean, how is it done do it, when to do it, and why it’s important.

Your Core, Defined

To know how to engage your core, you first have to know what your core actually is. Many people equate the term “core” with “six-pack,” but the anatomy of your core is more complex than you might realize. Your abs alone include four different abdominal muscles, and then there are all your back muscles to account for.

Here’s a look at the most important muscles when it comes to engaging your core:

  • Rectus abdominis: The most well-known ab muscle, the rectus abdominis is the muscle responsible for the coveted six-pack. It’s a long, flat muscle that extends from your pubic bone to your sixth and seventh ribs. Your rectus abdominis is primarily responsible for bending your spine.1

  • External obliques: These are the muscles on either side of your rectus abdominis. Your external obliques allow you to twist your torso, bend sideways, flex your spine, and compress your abdomen.1

  • Internal obliques: Your internal obliques lie just below your external obliques. They have the same functions.1

  • Transverse abdominis: This is the deepest layer of muscle in your abdomen. It completely wraps around your torso and extends from your ribs to your pelvis. Unlike the other ab muscles, your transverse abdominis isn’t responsible for moving your spine or hips, but it does stabilize your spine, compress your organs, and support your abdominal wall.1

  • Latissimus dorsi: Commonly called your “lats,” these muscles run along both sides of your spine from just below your shoulder blades to your pelvis. Your lats help you stabilize your back, especially when extending your shoulders. They also contribute to your ability to twist side to side.1

  • Erector spinae: You have erector spinae muscles on each side of your spine, and they extend the entire length of your back. These muscles are responsible for extending and rotating your back, as well as side-to-side movement. These are considered postural muscles and, to some degree, are always at work.

Your hip muscles and glutes also contribute to core stabilization, but not quite as much so as the above muscles.

What Does It Mean to Engage Your Core?

People learn from mistakes—in that sense, it might be easier to learn how to engage your core by understanding what not to do. Below are some common examples of failing to engage the core.

  • Your back arches while you perform shoulder presses or push-ups

  • Your back slumps while sitting down

  • Your lower back raises from the ground when trying to “hollow” your body

  • You lean far to one side when performing a single-arm shoulder press

  • You lose balance when performing single-leg exercises

All of the above scenarios a symptoms of a weak core in different ways. The first example—back arching when performing shoulder presses—is the easiest to dissect. When you perform a shoulder press, you should be able to extend your arms fully overhead while keeping your back in a neutral-spine position. If you can’t, your core muscles are weak, you haven’t learned how to engage and brace them.

How to Engage Your Core

Engaging your core means bracing and tightening all of the muscles in your core—your four abdominal muscles, lats, paraspinal muscles, hip flexors, and glutes—to keep your spine safe and stable. Picture everything from your rib cage to your pelvis: It should all feel like a single, strong cylinder.

It’s More Than Just “Sucking in” Your Stomach -It’s common to think that “engage your core” means “suck in your stomach.” But that’s actually pretty far from the truth; in fact, it’s quite the opposite.

To engage your core, imagine that you are bracing yourself for a sucker-punch right to the stomach. You’re not going to suck in your stomach. You’re going to take a deep breath and tighten all of your abdominal muscles. It may be helpful to picture “zipping up” your abs—bringing your navel up and toward your spine.

You should be able to continue to breathe when you engage your core: First, fill your belly, and then inhale and exhale, only allowing your rib cage to move. Your belly should remain tight and full after the initial breath. After that point, you should be able to see your ribs move in and out when you breathe.

It Starts With Your Breath

Breathing is perhaps the most important part of engaging your core because you must know how to continue breathing like normal while keeping your core tight. Every time you breathe, you have another chance to engage your core and create that strong cylinder of muscles from your ribs to your hips.

Why Should You Engage Your Core?

For starters, engaging your core decreases your chance of sustaining an injury while exercising. It creates a stable ring of musculature around your spine that keeps your vertebrae from flexing or extending too far, as well as from bending too far to one side or the other.

Protection From Injury

Forcing your back into those positions puts excessive pressure on your vertebrae and can lead to injuries such as lumbar spondylosis. a condition that involves degeneration of your spinal discs or facet joints. This condition and a similar one—spondylolysis, or stress fractures in the vertebrae—are relatively common in weightlifters5 and athletes.6 Failure to engage the core during exercise has also been linked to shoulder and elbow injuries.

Having core strength, which you can develop by bracing your core regularly (even while not exercising), can also help with chronic back pain.8 Basically, as one study puts it, “Core stability is a primary component of functional movement, essential in daily living and athletic activities."

On top of injury prevention and functional movement, engaging your core during exercise may improve your workout performance, though it’s not entirely agreed upon in the scientific community because there’s a lack of research on the exact relationship between core stability and fitness performance.

Engage Your Core All Day

You can prevent poor posture (and chronic pain related to poor posture) by engaging your core throughout daily activities.

Practice bracing your core while sitting at your desk and while walking to and from your usual places.

You can also practice during other day-to-day activities, such as grocery shopping—try engaging your core when you reach to grab something from a high shelf. It’s good practice that will transfer to your workouts!