Eloise Skinner<\/a>, a personal trainer and Pilates instructor. “Those two things are correlated, but there’s not necessarily a direct link between them.”<\/p>\n“Just because you have a six-pack, that doesn’t mean you have core strength to the same degree that you would if you’d worked on the whole of the core.”<\/p>\n
That’s because the core is made up of a surprising number of muscles, including your pelvic floor, glutes and hip muscles.<\/p>\n
Thankfully, you don’t need individual exercises to train each core muscle in isolation, and there’s one form of exercise Skinner recommends: “mat work in Pilates is really good for the core,” she says.<\/p>\n
To get you started, here are three mat-based Pilates exercises. Try them a couple of times a week to begin building strength in your deep core.<\/p>\n
1. Pelvic tilt <\/p>\n
Reps: 8<\/p>\n
Lie on your back with your knees bent and feet flat on the floor. Keep your spine in a neutral position.<\/p>\n
Contract and tighten your abdominal and buttock muscles to push your lower back into the mat, lifting the bottom of your pelvis.<\/p>\n
Hold for a breath, then slowly return to the starting position.<\/p>\n
2. High plank<\/p>\n
Time: 30sec<\/p>\n
Get on your hands and knees.<\/p>\n
Step one foot back at a time so your body is in a straight line from head to heels.<\/p>\n
Hold the position while breathing steadily.<\/p>\n
3. Seated roll down<\/p>\n
Reps: 5<\/p>\n
Sit up with your feet hip-width apart and your feet flat on the floor, with your arms extended in front of you.<\/p>\n
Slowly lower your torso back, as if being pulled down through the back of your belly button one vertebrae at a time, until you are lying on your back, keeping your feet flat on the floor and arms extended forward throughout.<\/p>\n
Inhale, and then slowly reverse the movement back to the start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Credit:…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":475709,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[26271,192586,239673,565,134,239672,111,139,69,10184,200059],"class_list":["post-475708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fitness","tag-core-strength","tag-deep-core","tag-eloise-skinner","tag-fitness","tag-health","tag-hip-muscles","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-personal-trainer","tag-pilates-exercises"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=475708"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475708\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/475709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=475708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=475708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=475708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/p>\n