Here’s a dive back to my very first newsletter, from 2019. We hadn’t yet encountered the pandemic, and I had never even used Zoom! Now, five years later, we’ve grown into a wonderful community, both online and in person:
I love Qigong, but have always worked my core muscles, too. While working in the dance field, Pilates was my go-to method to strengthen my back, abs, and glutes, i.e. core. This especially helped prevent injury to my sometimes-problematic low back. After leaving dance I had a love/hate relationship with the Barre method: rooted in Pilates, it’s a great core work-out but I hated doing it! Far too Yang for me.
I’m an anatomy nerd, so in 2005 while doing research for my book Strength Training Over 50 I was excited to learn that rotational movements, which are powered by the oblique muscles of the abdomen, are among the most effective exercises you can do to build abdominal support for the spine. Those twist- producing obliques do the most to flatten the abdomen and trim the waist, too. This makes sense when you consider the orientation of the obliques: They wrap diagonally around the waist from the side to the front and from the upper to lower trunk. Exhale and they cinch in much like a corset, helping support the spinal column. Functionally, along with spinal muscles, they bend, twist, and move the spine in many different directions, creating a balance of flexibility and strength throughout a wide range of activities.
One of the many things I love about Qigong is its wealth of wonderful rotational movements. They feel so good, a perfect blend of gentleness, flexibility and strength. Interestingly, just this evening I read “A review of basic core anatomy…reveals that 87.5% of the core muscles are oriented either diagonally or horizontally, and one action that these muscles perform is rotation (Santana 2000).”In other words, by rotating the torso you are engaging 87% of your abdominal core! No wonder it works so well. Coordinated with focused breathing (as in Pilates) rotational Qigong exercises like “Knocking on the Door of Life” are among my daily prescriptions for keeping my back healthy and happy. Once more, research backs up what those brilliant Taoists instinctually knew thousands of years ago. I know this is a subject near and dear to many of us, and thought it worth re-visiting.
