Prehabilitation – Why you should include Core Stability Training in Pre-Season.
As an athlete chances are at some time you’ll incur an injury involving damage to, your back, groin, hamstrings or knee, often your physiotherapist or trainer will prescribe core stability exercises as part of your rehabilitation.
Be prepared… Prehabilitation, historically pre season training programs focused on building base cardio conditioning and working on general strength increases. Best practice for Pre Season conditioning now includes a more “Prehabilitative’ component, a strategy used to reduce the risk of strains tears & pulls that effect our performance.
An integral component of any preseason will be core conditioning.
There are three major groups of core conditioning exercises:
- exercises focusing on getting the small deep-lying stabilizing muscles to work properly (such as the lower abdominal s and deep spinal muscles) to work properly. These exercises are often taken from clinical Pilates
- static body-weight exercises that concentrate on developing stability and/or strength endurance in certain postures. These need you to learn how simultaneously to work your small stabilizer muscles and the larger mobiliser muscles. One popular example is the ‘plank’
- traditional dynamic strength exercises for the main movement muscles of the trunk, often performed on the floor or Swiss ball.Your current program probably has 3 or 4 basic core exercises included which is a good start.
However…. There are 2 real limitations.
The first is behavioural, core exercises can quickly become boring, it takes self-discipline to do 20 – 30 minutes of the same exercises three or more times a week over a long period.
The second limitation is physiological, normal key training principles of specificity and progression apply to core work in the same way that they do to any other aspect of physical fitness. Experience tells us it is quite common for an athlete to perform the same core routine over a long period and get very good at four or five movements or ‘holds’. But teach the same athlete a new core exercise and they will find it difficult, simply because it’s a new stimulus.
The message is that progression and variety are key to optimizing benefits of a strengthening program.
The selection of core training plans provided here aims to overcome the issues of boredom and lack of challenge.
Plan 1 Core Exercises
Plan 2 Core Exercises
Plan 3 Swiss Ball Core Exercises
If you’d like to speak to us about getting the best out of these plans or to access more please click here to complete an online inquiry, happy training!