For many out there with low back pain and/or weakness, it is important to address core stability. This is the ability of the “core” of your body (low back, stomach, oblique, pelvic floor, diaphragm) to work as a unit to help increase the stability of the low back and surrounding areas.

When attempting to improve core stability, it’s not as easy as just trying to exercise individual muscles. Specific exercises must be done to ensure that the core works as one unit and is activated correctly during other movements. The following exercises are basic exercises that everyone must be able to perform properly before moving on to more complex activities.

Keep in mind that strength does not automatically translate into good core stability. A person’s abdominal muscles and back muscle may be very strong, but what is more important is that all of those muscles work together.

The first video here shows how to activate the core by performing pelvic tilts. As we may have covered in the office, this can be very difficult. Keep working at it on your own and we’ll check your form in the office.

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Once you’ve mastered this movement, you can increase the degree of difficulty by performing the “dead bug” exercises.

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This next set of videos shows proper rolling patterns. This is the basic movement pattern that we all learn as babies even before we attempt to crawl. If you cannot perform these rolls properly, all other motions that you attempt to put on top of these patterns will be less than ideal. With all of these core stability exercises and movement patterning exercises, form us of the utmost importance.

Easy Rolls
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More Difficult Rolls
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These are the basic core rehab exercises. In a future post, I will cover the intermediate core stability/core function exercises. Do not move on to more advanced exercises until these can be done with proper form and can be done with little effort.