TRANSVERSUS MAGIC
Dr Mel C Siff
“By focusing on your the transverse abdominis when you move, you can
improve your core control during exercise”, says NY City physical therapist
and personal trainer Suzanne Countryman. “Plus you’ll suffer less wear and
tear on your back, neck and knees”.
***Comment. Activation of transversus abdominis (TA) appears to be the
latest “hot” advice for core stabilisation and training among PTs and
fitness instructors. While voluntary activation of TA sometimes may be
useful in contributing to trunk stability in fairly static postures before
a dynamic multi-dimensional movement occurs, it becomes impossible and
unwise to mentally involve yourself in any dynamic training or sporting
tasks which activate numerous different patterns of contraction and
relaxation of many stabilising and moving muscles.
Moreover, the more rapid, more forceful or more complex the activity, the
less able one is able to focus on controlling the moment-to-moment action
of any given muscle. The inadvisability of doing this to TA or any other
muscle for that matter has often been fondly referred to in exercise
physiology as “paralysis by analysis.”
So, while you may be able to activate TA at the start of a squat, press,
jump, clean or deadlift, the moment that complex dynamic action begins, the
neural programs that control the pattern of movement will set off a series
of involuntary reflexes and motor actions over which one has little or no
control. In fact, deliberate attempts to activate TA often tend to
activate abdominal contraction and lumbar spinal flexion, which is the last
thing that you want during a heavy lift or complex action.
It is unnecessary to try to intervene in controlling in any given single
muscle once you are an experienced exerciser, because the correct
repetition of any exercise will ensure that your neural programs activate
or relax the necessary muscle in the most effective and safest manner. The
very reason that we practise technique is to create automatic neural
programs that we don’t have to ever think about during an exercise or
sporting action.
I leave the comment about TA control helping to protect neck and knees to
others for their scrutiny.
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ISOLATION PHILOSOPHY
Dr Mel C Siff
The therapeutic and fitness training worlds still seem to place a heavy
emphasis on an isolationist approach to physical testing and conditioning,
without carefully identifying the situational limitations and scope
whenever such as approach is used.
Attempts are made to test and train muscles individually. Few days pass
without comments being made on isolating the upper or lower abdominals for
training, selectively training the core of the body, activating
transversus abdominis to ’stabilise the trunk’, testing for weaknesses or
imbalances in certain muscle groups or explaining poor performance or
injury on the basis of imbalance in some isolated system of the body.
The body constitutes a linked system and, unless the scope and limitations
of any given isolationist approach is meticulously identified, it is
misleading and unwarranted to use and extrapolate findings based on
isolationist methods. If one unquestioningly applies isolationist methods,
then it is being assumed that the isolated area concerned constitutes a
closed system. This implies further that this isolated system is not
affected by or does not affect what happens in adjacent or other linked
systems, or at least that any such interaction with other systems is
insignificant.
The trunk, abdominals, lower extremity, knee and so forth are not closed
systems and any action involving these subsystems influences what is
happening in all parts of the body and the body as a whole. It is vital
that the body be regarded in terms of a systems theoretical approach,
rather than one which makes very tenuous assumptions about the closedness
of conveniently isolated subsystems whose apparent isolation from other
systems invariably is based entirely on convenience or convenience.
Even if one attempts to apply a systems theoretical approach, it may still
be inadequate to regard the entire body as the superordinate closed system,
as is implied, for instance, by the current somewhat simplistic emphasis on
so-called “core training”. The limitations of the latter concept may
readily be noticed if one observes that it is very rare in land-based sport
for core stability to be manifested in the absence of contact with the
ground or external objects. Peripheral stability, which usually is reliant
on solid contact between the extremities of the body with some surface, is
essential before core stability becomes implicated in a given sporting
action on land.
Without adequate peripheral stabilisation, the functional capabilities of
the “core” are meaningless. The entire body or the body-surface constitutes
the appropriate closed system for our attention. Thus, if terms such as
“core stabilisation” are to be used, then they need to be carefully applied
within the appropriate context.
This is not to negate the value of approaches that use isolationist
approaches for valid therapeutic or analytical reasons, such as those
involving EMG mediated biofeedback, “Kegel” exercises, and post surgical
respiratory exercises, but it is to stress that the unqualified application
of isolationist approaches to sports conditioning needs to be viewed with
careful circumspection.
If we do so, then we may also become far more careful to avoid referring
rigidly to certain muscles as stabilisers, movers, agonist, antagonists,
flexors, adductors and so on, instead choosing to refer to the stabilising,
moving, agonistic, antagonistic, flexor and adduction roles of a muscle
during any given phase of a specific motor action.
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Someone from the original group which initiated the discussion on a
squatting article in that bodybuilding magazine reminded me that I also
sent in these comments about belt wearing and squats. Here it is, just in
case some folk feel that the critique may be incomplete without inclusion
of this aspect.
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Dr Mel Siff