How a simple physioball can fortify your core

June 25, 2017 Ashley 0 Comments

Having fabulous abs is a lovely side effect of weight loss and brawn gains, am I right?

I mean, who doesn’t love the look of a whittled down middle? And it’s a gift that keeps on giving to your body. By building up the muscles of your midsection, you save yourself a whole sack’ve somatic issues later – back pain, strained muscles, turning into an IRL “Life Alert” granny calling out from the floor… See, by working out your abs ‘n back it helps protect that whole area – from back to front. That means less time spent walking around like a two by four with legs. It also means better balance and fewer injuries – whether you’re an avid athletic nut or just performing your weekly, ritualistic “one trip or die trying” effort to ferry your groceries in from the car.

But you don’t wanna hafta go all out at 24 Hour Fitness, 24/7 to get it.

(“This is my first time seeing sunlight or being outside a gym in over a year!”)

You’re too busy for the gym. And crunches hurt your back.

And, I’d say that that’s just the way the ball bounces and to suck it up (or suck it in). However, a literal ball might just be the answer to your excuses problem. By buying and blowing up a simple rubber sphere (more commonly known as a physioball), you can stand to stand up straighter with fantastic abs and less stress on the ol’ spine. All you’ve gotta do is two things – only one of which is an exercise. Granted, more variety would be ideal. But even if you only do this pair on the daily, improvements will indeed be seen.

The first is the exercise element of it. (Yes, not all’ve this is effortless.)

First, you assume a pushup sort’ve position on the ball.

Then, keeping your hands planted, you pull your knees into your chest.

Protip: keep the ol’ back straight and try to avoid hunching your shoulders up.

Uncomfy as it is on those typically inactive abs, that’s exactly where we should all be feelin’ it. And how many should you do? Well, start with three reps of ten on these. Feel like you can do more? Go for it. Then, after you’ve been doing this routine for a yawn worthy amount of time, you can level up variety-wise by changing the angle. If you straighten your legs out to a 45 degree angle each time you come out of the crunch, you can work other tummy muscles as well.

Then, for the second advantage to bobbing around on this thing, is what happens after crunch time. When you’re done with your intentional workout, you can spend your work-time getting an unintentional one in as well. That’s right. This thing can fortify that washboard-to-be of yours without much effort at all… when you use it as a seat. By simply plopping down onto this inflated orb, your core will engage to hold you straight up. Compare this to a regular, basic-bish seat, where everything southerly on your body goes silent (and makes a bunch of stuff tight that shouldn’t be, thereby throwing off your posture), and you’ve got a diesel grade two-fer here. Plus, without all that tightness, it’ll make workout number next a helluva lot easier.

So, if your core could use a little honing, don’t delay.

Hit up your local sporty store ‘n get on the ball, stat!