15 Reasons to Build Your Core Strength

People often equate building core strength with getting rock-solid abs, but there’s actually a lot more that can be attributed to a strong core. Your core — including your abdominal and back muscles — is the foundation of your body and is responsible for many functions. Weak core muscles can make you fatigue easily, be more prone to injury, and prevent you from completing everyday tasks…the list goes on. If you want to strengthen your yoga practice and how you function in your daily life, you need to work on building your core strength.

Build stamina to hold longer yoga poses

Start thinking about some basic, most-practiced yoga poses, such as Downward Dog (Adho Mukha Svanasana), Tree Pose (Vrikshasana), or Warrior II (Virabhadrasana II). What do these all have in common? They all go to the core in some way. Almost all yoga poses require some core involvement, either as the focus of the pose or simply to help you maintain balance and posture while the rest of the body takes care of the weight. The stronger your core is, the more stamina you’ll need to hold the pose for longer and you’ll push the limits of your practice.

Get ready for challenging yoga poses

While it’s good to build your stamina to hold longer poses, you should also start exploring more challenging poses. By strengthening your core, you’ll be better prepared to approach more difficult poses—and you’ll likely practice them more successfully. If you want to go further into poses like Handstand (Adho Mukha Vrksasana), Dancer (Natarajasana), Scorpion (Vrischikasana), or the daunting arm balance, you need a solid core to build upon.

improve posture

Weak core muscles directly affect your posture. As the foundation of your body, your core is vital to your posture. The abdominal and lower back muscles, especially, support your spine and pelvis and hold them in place. When your core muscles aren’t strong enough to really support the weight and movement of these parts of your body, your posture starts to suffer. To consistently maintain a healthy posture with a straight spine and shoulders back, you need to build core strength to maintain it.

find your balance

Balance is not only crucial to your yoga practice, but also a part of your daily life. Whether you’re doing complex yoga poses or just walking down the street, your core plays an important role in keeping you upright and stable throughout the day. If you want to test your balance, you can try standing on one leg with your eyes closed. If you can’t stay here for more than ten seconds, your core might benefit from some targeted exercise. Your core muscles stabilize and become the foundation of your entire body. So if you want to improve your balance, you need to go straight to the source.

Prevents injuries on and off the mat

Adequate core strength has been shown to help prevent injuries during physical activity and everyday tasks. In a study of athletes competing in tennis, swimming, and volleyball, it was found that subjects with greater core stability reported fewer shoulder injuries, which are especially common in these sports. Weak core strength can lead to overall injury in any part of the body as it leads to decreased endurance and increased fatigue, so maintaining a strong core is important.

relieve back pain

Back pain is at least partially due to core muscle weakness. Your abs are the front anchor of your spine. So when they’re weak, parts of the body supported by the spine can be affected — perhaps most notably the back muscles. Core strength training has been studied for chronic back pain and has been found to play a role in relieving pain and reducing the likelihood of back injury.

protect your internal organs

If you think about your core, you’ll see that this is an area that doesn’t have much bony structure, but has a lot to protect. This is where strong core muscles come into play. There are four main groups of abdominal muscles that cover your internal organs: the transversus abdominis, rectus abdominis, external obliques, and internal obliques. These play an important role in protecting your internal organs, central nervous system, and important veins and arteries from outside activities that could harm them. By exercising these four major muscle groups, you can better protect these areas of your body from potential injury.

support your spine

Just as your core protects your internal organs, it also supports your spine. As mentioned earlier, the abdominal muscles form the anterior anchor of the spine. Your spine and core work together to help you move around throughout the day with ease and pain – as long as they’re both strong, supported and functionally healthy. A strong core helps ensure your spine stays supported during all of these movements and keeps it from straining or injuring you.

knee protection

They may look like they’ve been removed from your abs and back, but even your knees are protected by a strong core! A set of core muscles around the hip joint help protect the knee by keeping it properly aligned. One study found that participants with knee problems were better able to recover from their problems after performing core-strengthening exercises. another study