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Physio exercises for core muscle strengthening are an essential physiotherapy plan for many types of musculoskeletal morbidity, such as lower back pain, sciatic nerve pain, bulging disc, and, in general, poor body posture.
The most important core muscles are:
Abdominal muscle strengthening in isolation is essential for a targeted physiotherapy rehabilitation plan.
Abdominal muscle-strengthening exercises mean we have to engage and activate as much as possible only the abdominal muscles, not the hip flexor muscles.
For example, the rectus abdominis muscle has only two actions on the trunk and pelvis, such as:
So, the so-called lower abdominals, where we lift the legs or the lower back from the floor, do not activate only the rectus abdominis muscle but the hip flexors too, as they are not connected with the legs or can not lift the lower back from the floor.
For example, excessive exercise of sit-ups and raising the leg can cause lower back pain if the patient or athlete does not have a strong rectus abdominis.
This happens because when we do sit-up and rise leg exercises, we activate and engage one of the most important hip flexor muscles, which is the iliopsoas muscle. The iliopsoas muscle originates from T12, L1, L2, L3, and L4 vertebras and the iliac crest bone, and for this reason, it can stress and produce inflammation of the lumbar tract of the spine and sacrum-iliac joint.
Another important reason to focus on abdominal exercise in isolation for sports physiotherapy is that most athletes and sedentary people have hip flexors and quad muscles stronger than core muscles, such as abdominal muscles and gluteus muscles.
This muscle imbalance can create body instability and an excessive anterior pelvic tilt.
The image gallery below shows abdominal muscles strengthening in isolation exercises to target as much as possible only the rectus abdominis, the External Oblique Muscle, the Internal Oblique Muscle, and the Transversus Abdominis Muscle.
As I have explained before, for the abdominals, the same concept of isolation is important for glute strengthening, too.
Among the general population and many athletes, there is quite often a muscle imbalance between quad and the hip flexor muscles, and the gluteus muscles.
Generally, the gluteus muscles are weaker than the quads and hip flexor muscles.
For example, squats and lunges exercises engage a lot more quads and hip flexor muscles than the gluteus muscles. For this reason, if we have a muscle imbalance and we do a lot of squats and lunges, we will never fix the muscle discrepancy between these two groups of muscles.
So glute strengthening in isolation means that we have to try to engage and activate as much as possible only the gluteal muscles.
The image gallery below shows glute muscles strengthening in isolation exercise to target as much as possible only the Gluteus Maximus Muscle, Gluteus Medius Muscle, and Gluteus Minimus Muscle.
Some of the exercises proposed engage and activate the Piriformis Muscle too, which is a very important muscle to strengthen to fix and cure the so-called Piriformis Syndrome or Deep Gluteal Syndrome.
If you follow this physiotherapy exercise for core muscle strengthening, you can get many benefits both for your health and sports performance, such as:
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