Transversus abdominis training - your core activated!
The transversus abdominus muscle acts as your body's natural corset. It extends from your sternum to pubic bone in the front, all the way along the bottom of your ribcage and the top of your pelvis in the front. It wraps around both sides of your torso along the bottom of your ribs and along the ridge of your pelvis and blends into a super strong, girdling connective tissue structure along both sides of the spine at the mid and low back called the thoracolumbar fascia.
This offers tremendous support for your spine-as long as you can make that muscle fire when needed! But if you are experiencing back pain, your corset muscle is inhibited and disengaged-unable to work for you through your movements throughout the day. Let's wake it up!
In a sitting position, bring your fingers to the bones that stick out in the front of your pelvis. Bring your fingers in towards your midline an inch and an inch down towards your pubic bone. Allow your fingers to gently rest on your abdomen and put your feelers on, you want to sense what is going on in the tissue underlying them.
Envision the area below your belly button and above your pubic bone. Think about those muscles just under your skin and the tissue lying just under your skin drawing in away from your fingers. You are trying to tighten those muscles underneath your fingers in such a way that you feel your abdominal contents drawing in away from your fingers.
You may feel, simply, a tightening of your abdominal muscles and not an actual retreat away from the fingers. If you feel your abdominal muscles tightening under you and or a drawing away from your fingers, you have just engaged your transversus abdominis (TA)! But if you feel the abdominal contents pushing out, or, the abdominal muscles pushing out against your fingers, you are engaging your abdominal obliques muscles and NOT the TA. This contraction will not be helpful to stabilize your low back and can even be detrimental to your bladder. This contraction can cause undue pressure on the bladder. It is critical that you feel the abdominal muscles drawing in.
If you are having difficulty feeling this drawing in contraction of the muscle, please let me know so I can help you engage the correct muscles!
Now try engaging your TA while standing. See if you feel the same thing happening. If you are feeling your abdominal contents / abdominal muscles pushing out against your fingers, let me know so we can learn how to engage your TA instead of your obliques.
Here's the best part of being able to recruit your natural corset, the TA. You now can engage this muscle for support for your spine when you need it! You just draw in, contracting those TA muscles just before you move, say, when bending down to get something off the floor, rising from a chair, getting in/out of a car, or making a reach out to the side of you for something, any transition or movement that you think may or usually does hurt as you do it. Use this as the valuable tool that it is.
Practice it often so it becomes natural for your body to do before attempting these movements!
There was an important study performed a long while ago that I often mention to my low back pain patients. Scientists took a study group and divided them in half, low back pain patients in one group and non low back pain people in another. They fitted them with devices in order to read what muscles were working. They then threw them a ball and in the non low back pain group, the very first muscle to engage was the TA. Not the arm muscles that we sense as having moved first. Instead, it was the protective and supportive TA! In the low back pain group, the TA NEVER came in.
Using this study and many others Physical Therapists came to understand that low back pain inhibits the TA muscle. It is essentially taken off the brain's radar. Your natural corset is no longer engaging when you need it most! So the TA does not need so much strength as it does activation and engagement to help you. “Strengthening” your core is not as important as ENGAGING your core or ACTIVATING your core. If the TA comes in when you need it, it will keep your spine supported.
Perfect practice makes perfect: never assume it is engaging correctly. Check yourself using the above method every now and again in the future, more often, many times per day as you are trying to get the brain to engage it!
It doesn’t take any extra time out of your day, it just requires a little attention throughout your day as you go about your regular activities. It can be performed every time you go to the bathroom or take a drink of water in your day! It can be performed in any position, and should be, to make sure it engages in all positions you are in in your day! You need to RE-TRAIN your brain to muscle pathway and reinforce it often so that firing your TA becomes part of the way you move. Use it as the powerful game-changer that it is!!
What fires together, wires together!