Movement & Neuroscience Nugget: Love your belly
Do you find in many yoga and fitness classes that you’re constantly being told the following:
activate your core
pull navel to spine
draw your belly button in
engage your mula bandha
lift your pelvic floor
Sometimes this is appropriate, like when you’re lifting something really heavy. However, these cues are tightening, stiffening strategies to activate the core and we don’t always want to maintain that rigid state. Really, we want to enable our core to move along with our pressure system (the breathing mechanism).
On the inhale, our diaphragm pushes down and flattens, our belly and ribs should expand (and we may also feel it in our back ribs, since our lungs are 3D). The internal pressure has increased so we need to expand to accommodate the additional air we’ve breathed in. On the exhale, the diaphragm relaxes and the core activates reflexively. So there’s an elegant dance between the diaphragm and the pelvic floor, as one contracts the other relaxes and vice versa.
If we kept engaging our core throughout our entire practice (and maybe off the mat too!) guess what happens? Well, it’s like any other kind of muscle, it gets overworked its gets short, tight, fatigued and a bit cranky. An overactive pelvic floor can lead to incontinence and prolapse, the very things most of us want to avoid! A much better idea would be to utilise ways to get the core to work reflexively (without conscious effort) but more on that topic another time.
Next time you’re on the mat and off it, maybe just enjoy letting your diaphragm do its work and allow your belly to expand for at least some of your practice and show that belly some LOVE by giving it a break.
