Ask-A-Coach: When and How to Brace

In exercise and fitness, few concepts are more widely touted while being as significantly misunderstood than bracing. You may hear it all the time whether you’re in pilates, yoga or strength training, “brace your core!” Bracing isn’t sucking in your gut, or tightening up your stomach as hard as you can. So then, what is it?

A proper brace requires creating as much volume in our stomach as possible, followed by tightening our muscles to create intra-abdominal pressure. That sounds complex, but there’s two drills I like to use to allow us to feel the difference, so let’s get into them. The first features a position we’re often in during workouts; hands on our hips! Place your hands on your hips and push them in. At the same time, slowly exhale and try to push the sides of your stomach back into your hands. If you do this correctly, you should feel the stomach expand out and become rigid. Another concept is placing one hand on the front of your stomach and another on your side, lower than your ribs. From here, when taking a big breath, we should feel our stomach expand out into our hands. If we breathe improperly, we’ll instead feel our chest rise and fall so keep that pressure on your stomach. In both examples, after you’ve made that big inhale through your stomach, then tighten your stomach as if you’re about to be punched there.

Once we’ve applied this bracing into our exercise, we’ll see significant change in the movement itself. For example, if we brace before performing a goblet squat, we turn that exercise from simply a leg dominant movement to one that’s more of a full body strain. Simply, bracing allows us to keep our spine in good alignment, prevent lower back pain and fatigue, and perhaps more fun, allows us to lift heavier! Bracing isn’t just sucking in your gut, or breathing properly. In bracing, we’re trying to apply intra-abdominal pressure to hold throughout our heavy movement. This allows us to keep our spine in good alignment, prevent fatigue and pain to our lower back, and perhaps most exciting, lift heavier!