Dr. Darcy Worthylake, Xi'an (2026)

04/09/2020

❤️

20/03/2020

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Core Stability and Functional Movement

Core stability - a term that is often used, poorly understood, and perhaps not really entirely accurate with respect to encompassing and representing what people mean when they use it. Speaking only for myself, core stability is at least in part the ability to allow the limbs (who derive their base of support from the core and use it to transfer force) to work efficiently and effectively. Example: if hip flexion pulls the spine towards the femur while attempting to pull the femur in the sagittal plane, the latter will be less effective & require additional assistance in doing so. That is neither effective nor efficient. According to Beck, non-contact injuries occur because of high velocity movements coupled with the lack of preparatory muscle coordination and/or inappropriate reactive muscle activity.
One of the more common way to determine these aberrant patterns are functional movement screens. One of the issues we have is the lack of empirical evidence concerning the effects of a core stability training program on functional movement patterns. Enter Bagherian et al in JSR 2019 where the authors set out to determine the effect of core stability training on functional movement patterns. They demonstrated improvements in the FMS, L*D and YBT scores in the experimental group relative to the control group. Independent sample t-tests showed that change scores were larger (meaning greater improvement) for the FMS total score and Hurdle step in athletes with worse movement quality. I respectfully suggest that a tailored rehab program (theirs was a generic 8-exercise protocol) would likely have been even more effective albeit more difficult to study. The purpose of a functional assessment is to determine specific issues with movement and provide exercises to ameliorate them, instead of applying a one-size-fits-all rehab program. Despite this, it was still shown to be effective in this study.
Stay safe everyone!