Weight Training Advice
Increasing Core Strength
helping you avoid injuries while lifting.
The body's core is basically the center of it. This area includes the abdominals, lower back, and the obliques. These muscles help support your body when you doing pretty much any weight training exercise.
Strengthening the lower back area is especially important to increasing core strength. If you have a weak lower back, you're going have a harder time supporting heavy weights on exercises that have you lifting overhead, such as military and dumbbell presses. Heavy squats also require a stong lower back area. The deadlift is, without a doubt, the staple exercise for increasing lower back strength. Good morning and hyperextensions are other great lower back exercises.
To succeed at increasing core strength you'll want to have strong abdominals as well. Building strong abs is important by itself, and even more so because you want to have a balance between the ab and lower back areas. Not having this balance can lead to injury and even be bad for your posture. Since the abs are a muscle group that recovers faster than other muscles from training, you can do some work for them more often. Be sure to include exercises such as crunches and leg raises in your abdominal workout routine.
The oblique muscles on the sides of the midsection also play an important role in increasing core strength. You don't necessarily want to bulk up your obliques, but you do need them to be stronger for optimal core strength. Doing crunches, incline sit-ups, and leg raises where you alternate sides will help strengthen the obliques. Doing side bends with light dumbbells or cables will also help.
Increasing core strength is also very important to the balance and stability of your body. Because of this, doing some exercises on a core ball is a good idea. This will not only help you increase core stength, but also the stability of your body.
Of course, you've probably seen many people at the gym do abdominal exercises on a core ball. This is certainly a good idea, but you don't have to stop there. You can do many weight training exercises on a core ball to help increase your core strength and stability. You may not necessarily want to make your entire routine made up of core ball training, but throwing in a few exercises on one after you've done your major compound exercises is okay. Just about any exercise that involves dumbbells can be done on a core ball. These include dumbbell bench presses and flyes, overhaed dumbbell presses, lateral raises, and seated dumbbell curls. You can also do hyperextensions for the lower back on a core ball. Just make sure that when you're lifting weights on a core ball that you don't go too heavy.
Once you've succeeded at increasing core strength, you'll find that your balance is improved and you won't be as likely to get once of those dreaded lower back injuries when lifting heavy.
If you are into weight training, it's very important to increase your core strength. Increasing core strength will help you get stronger on most compound upper and lower body exercises, as well as
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