Core Muscles

Thank you isobel for the muscle education :) Could you please tell me how I would feel these muscles distinctively? In what movement/position would I be mainly using them? (Just trying to know what you were talking about and see if I have made use of those muscles in swimming) You can feel them by lying on the floor and putting your hand right above your hip joint. Many people don't know where their hip joints are (forgive me if times have changed), but your hip joints are on either side of your pubic area, the hollows where the top of your femur "rests" in a little cup). So your hip joints are about a small-hand's width apart from each other. Everyone can feel their psoas when it is engaged, even if it is weak. It is a palpable muscle in that area, right above the hip joint. So press your back against the floor, contract your abdominal muscles by so doing, and push your hand into the area right above your hip joint. You should feel a muscle flex, or form into something that feels a bit ropelike. Then relax and it will disappear. It may be very small (which would indicate it is not very strong), as in, it may feel maybe just 1/2 inch thick, or it may feel like a nice thick rope, an inch or so (strength!). (I am relying on memory from dance classes from long ago, but this is my memory.) The psoas is a very deep muscle of the trunk, but you can feel it where it connects at the hips. In one dance class I was told to always be engaging my psoas muscle, except when I was asleep or if I was dead. This is a basic premise behind "pure" Pilates training as well (there are a lot of spinoffs of Pilates now, but those who are truly certified will have taken possibly years of training to understand how to engage these deep muscles). I'm going to see if I can attach an illustration of the psoas and quadratum lumborum so you can see how deep they are and how essential they would be to strength. One thing I remember from dance class was that if you are doing situps and your stomach goes up as you do them, then you are engaging superficial muscles. To engage your psoas you need to be pressing into the floor, including your abdominals. One amazing demonstration of the power of the psoas I saw was that you can engage it for strength without fully engaging the quad. Imagine the rest that would give your (my) poor legs when swimming. The woman demonstrating was doing pelvic bridges and lifting one leg out straight; her quad was pretty relaxed, so she was initiating the movement from her psoas. I am not there yet. As I said, I slump. OK. Let's see if I can get this illustration uploaded. Also, as far as is it a fast twitch or slow twitch muscle, I don't know. I started to research it but found myself reading about dissected rabbits and I didn't want to read about them. I did see an interesting link that turned into an ad, but it was saying that any type of training that is repetitive and lasts longer than 10 minutes is going to be training your muscles to be slow twitch. You can train your muscles to be fast twitch, according to this article/ad, the way martial artists do (however that is), such that they can kick and break a board in seconds. Anyhow, I always thought fast/slow twitch was genetic, and that people are born one way or the other, that slow twitch muscles have more "red meat" (blood?) for aerobic exchange, while fast twitch muscles are more like white meat (lots of Krebs cycle/ATP energy exchange). Thus in freshman biology we, sigh, mashed up bees' wings to see that they were loaded with mitochondria, where all the energy exchange takes place (memory here again), which was why they could move their wings so fast. I digress. Psoas illustration presented below. Don't know if you train this to be fast/slow twitch. Seems to me it would be slow because it is a stabilizing muscle but I am not a scientist.

Thank you isobel for the muscle education :) Could you please tell me how I would feel these muscles distinctively? In what movement/position would I be mainly using them? (Just trying to know what you were talking about and see if I have made use of those muscles in swimming) You can feel them by lying on the floor and putting your hand right above your hip joint. Many people don't know where their hip joints are (forgive me if times have changed), but your hip joints are on either side of your pubic area, the hollows where the top of your femur "rests" in a little cup). So your hip joints are about a small-hand's width apart from each other. Everyone can feel their psoas when it is engaged, even if it is weak. It is a palpable muscle in that area, right above the hip joint. So press your back against the floor, contract your abdominal muscles by so doing, and push your hand into the area right above your hip joint. You should feel a muscle flex, or form into something that feels a bit ropelike. Then relax and it will disappear. It may be very small (which would indicate it is not very strong), as in, it may feel maybe just 1/2 inch thick, or it may feel like a nice thick rope, an inch or so (strength!). (I am relying on memory from dance classes from long ago, but this is my memory.) The psoas is a very deep muscle of the trunk, but you can feel it where it connects at the hips. In one dance class I was told to always be engaging my psoas muscle, except when I was asleep or if I was dead. This is a basic premise behind "pure" Pilates training as well (there are a lot of spinoffs of Pilates now, but those who are truly certified will have taken possibly years of training to understand how to engage these deep muscles). I'm going to see if I can attach an illustration of the psoas and quadratum lumborum so you can see how deep they are and how essential they would be to strength. One thing I remember from dance class was that if you are doing situps and your stomach goes up as you do them, then you are engaging superficial muscles. To engage your psoas you need to be pressing into the floor, including your abdominals. One amazing demonstration of the power of the psoas I saw was that you can engage it for strength without fully engaging the quad. Imagine the rest that would give your (my) poor legs when swimming. The woman demonstrating was doing pelvic bridges and lifting one leg out straight; her quad was pretty relaxed, so she was initiating the movement from her psoas. I am not there yet. As I said, I slump. OK. Let's see if I can get this illustration uploaded. Also, as far as is it a fast twitch or slow twitch muscle, I don't know. I started to research it but found myself reading about dissected rabbits and I didn't want to read about them. I did see an interesting link that turned into an ad, but it was saying that any type of training that is repetitive and lasts longer than 10 minutes is going to be training your muscles to be slow twitch. You can train your muscles to be fast twitch, according to this article/ad, the way martial artists do (however that is), such that they can kick and break a board in seconds. Anyhow, I always thought fast/slow twitch was genetic, and that people are born one way or the other, that slow twitch muscles have more "red meat" (blood?) for aerobic exchange, while fast twitch muscles are more like white meat (lots of Krebs cycle/ATP energy exchange). Thus in freshman biology we, sigh, mashed up bees' wings to see that they were loaded with mitochondria, where all the energy exchange takes place (memory here again), which was why they could move their wings so fast. I digress. Psoas illustration presented below. Don't know if you train this to be fast/slow twitch. Seems to me it would be slow because it is a stabilizing muscle but I am not a scientist.