The Forgotten Core Exercises (NOT ABS!)

Build an incredibly strong core by training like an athlete here

What’s up guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. COM. The other day we did a video where we talked about how a bad back can truly undermine your training. Unless you are training it the right way.

And I did refer to, at one point in the video, the value of having a strong Core and not just the Core that you might define as the Core. Right, we’re not just talking about the Abs and the Obliques but we’ve got to consider everything from the hips up into the shoulders, if we want to really factor in everything we need to, to get stronger and prevent low back pain from recurring in our workouts. Well I think one of the most overlooked and forgotten Core muscles, if we’re going to do that, is the Glute Medius, which is a muscle here that lies in the hips underneath the bigger Gluteus Maximus that we all know and are familiar with and this muscle here is incredibly important when it comes to providing the stability of our Pelvis that we need to have not only a stronger Core, but to not shift the brunt of the responsibility up to the low back which is what eventually will lead to those back pain and back degenerations. So, what do we do for it? Well first of all, the Glute Medius it’s function is to stabilize the Pelvis, as I said and we’re stabilizing from the bottom up.

And if we look at it, every time we lift a leg up, so if I were to lift up my left leg here, my Pelvis wants to fall to that side, because we don’t have that dual support anymore from below. So it just wants to fall in the direction of the lifted leg. Well think about how many times a day you lift your leg. Every single time you take a step. Or if you’re going to run, now you’re adding the impact of running on top of that.

But you have to be able to keep a stable Pelvis and we do that with our Glute Medius on the opposite side, the grounded leg. So we want to be able to keep a Pelvis that’s level, even when we lift our leg off of the ground. And when we have a real weakness of the Glute Medius we start to get this dropping here, even every so slight, that will lead to a breakdown and a shifting of that responsibility up the chain. There are some things we can do about this and it’s actually pretty simple because we can start with just very easy Bodyweight version of this, and we don’t need a lot of space, we don’t need a lot of time and what’s good about it is, as I’m going to address in just a second, you can do this multiple times throughout the day. You know without trying to add to your overall training time or volume.

If you’re already short on time. All you have to do is position yourself next to something stable, so pretend there’s a wall over here, you stand on your opposite leg, and now you allow yourself to just drop in the direction that it wants to if you stop letting your Glute Medius do the work. You would get this hip drop out to the side like I talked about. The drill here, the exercise is to just to contract your way back to a level Pelvis, ok. If you want to exaggerate, you can go even a little bit higher but you’ll feel that all the contract comes right here, through that Glute Medius, and you treat it like a high rep exercise.

We try to work it back up to about 50 reps here in continuous fashion and you’ll see, guys that can squat a lift of weight at the Pro level will be debilitated by this by about 20 reps. But see if you can allow the burn, you know and fight the burn and work your way through until you can get all the way up to 50 reps. And you work on both sides. And then we can take it and we can make it a little bit more difficult, make the resisted version of this and actually a little bit more functional version of this, by doing what we call Palof Press. And what this you just take a band, you attach it again somewhere stable to the side of you.

And we’re going to work in two different planes of motion here. We’re going to get on that side, ok and we’re going to press out. And what it wants to do is again, pull me in this direction, down to this direction. That’s what the band is doing is pulling me there. But at the same time when I press out ii’s trying to get a little bit of a rotation and turn me in that direction.

So we’ve got two forces now that we’re fighting. Not only do we not want the hips to drop there we want to let the Glute Medius work, but then we have to control the rotation every time I press out that it wants to try to pull me that way. So now we’re making it a lot more Athletic and we’re making it more functional to what we’re trying to do. Ok, so you do your Press’s here and you try to go for about 15 Press’s straight out in front of you. Then we change the direction of the force, so now we take out Press and we try, my hips are on fire as I talk about this, and I press up, let me go a little bit closer, I press straight up here ok, so now as I drive it up, now it wants to pull me down that way, so I have to be able to support but also work in the frontal plane here too.

So I’ve combined again two degrees of motion here and really it sets my hips on fire, as I’m pushing straight up. Guys the whole thing about this though is, guys will go crazy with their Core training and say Oh, I’m working my Core, I’m doing all this Single Leg balance, you know, Dumbbell Curls and things like that. Remember, there’s a time and a place for everything. Just because you’re doing Single Leg training doesn’t mean that you’re working on Hip stability. Because if you’re doing Single Leg training on a Curl, with the effect of trying to improve your Biceps, you’re actually doing kind of a shit job on both sides of it because you’re not really strengthening your Biceps as much as you can because the instability from below is compromising that and you’re not doing a real good job on working these Glute Medius exercises the way you should be, if you dial it back a little bit and do what I’m showing you here.

So you’re kind of robbing Peter to pay Paul and you’re getting a poor job on both ends. If you want to do Hip stability, especially if you have a back injury and coming back from a back injury, I highly suggest you do, then treat it as such, give it it’s own little routine, give it it’s own little time. And work on these things, again 5 minutes, 6 minutes is all it’s going to take, but work on it multiple times a week and you’ll see a difference with your training. Guys, if you’re looking for a plan that kind of lays it all out and shows you how to train like an Athlete, because as I said, even Athletes sometimes overlook the importance of these smaller muscles and these smaller routines, just how much they impact the big picture. Head to ATHLEANX.

COM right now and get our ATHLEANX Training System. Let me Coach me through all your workouts, let me show you how to do this, step by step so that you can maximize everything that you’ve got, and most of all, stay Healthy and keep doing what you’re doing here so that you can make your gains, week after week, month after month. Alright guys, if you found this video helpful, make sure you leave your comments and thumbs up below. And I’ll be back here again in just a few days with another video. Let me know below what you want to see and I’ll do my best to make sure I can bring them to you.

Alright guys, see ya’.