No sit-ups or crunches: Stand tall and straight without stiffening your shoulders

Are you like a Michelin man? You know the tyre company’s icon: a jolly, bouncy man built entirely of tyres.

Like the Michelin man, your chest is meant to be partially supported by internal pressure. The Michelin man’s body is supported by air. Your chest on the other hand is supported by the water pressure in your abdomen.

In fact, your body has between 50% and 60% water. Your internal organs both contain a lot of water and are surrounded largely by water.

How the water supports your chest

To provide support the water needs a firm container. For you, the container is the muscles of your belly, your pelvic floor and your diaphragm. When these muscles are working correctly, the water pressure lifts your chest up away from your hips.

The problem arises when those belly muscles aren’t working properly. Not working properly, your belly muscles end up pulling your chest hard down into your hips, doubling you over. Can you imagine a Michelin man suffering from severe stomach cramps? That’s what it’s like.

That hefty muscular pull down on your chest is why you have to over-tighten your back muscles. That’s how you haul yourself back up straight. Since your back muscles are not meant to carry such a big burden, you enlist the big, strong shoulder muscles in your back to help, bracing your shoulders back. Doing so shortens your back, pulling you backwards and down. It’s as though you were too tightly strapped into a full-body climbing harness.

To stop doing all this and stand tall again, you need to use your belly muscles properly. This is the what core strength is really all about.

Core strength

There are two major reasons you, like most people, lack sufficient core strength:–

You use the wrong muscles
Your right muscle is too weak

1. Using the wrong muscles

Most of your belly muscles are not the right muscles for core strength. Their purpose is not to support your abdominal wall. Their main purpose is to bend and twist you.

Which are these wrong muscles? They include the external oblique muscles, the internal oblique muscles, the rectus muscle and even the higher parts of your transversus abdominis muscle.

That doesn’t leave much. In fact, it virtually only leaves the lower part of your transversus abdominis. The reason this muscle is right and the others aren’t is that all the others pull down on your chest. This one doesn’t, it only holds you together. It simply wraps around your hips and lower abdomen holding everything firmly in place.

Learning to use only the right muscles means you need to avoid sit-ups and crunches.

Avoiding sit-ups and crunches

Sit-ups and crunches do nothing for transversus abdominis. They only strengthen the other muscles. The lower part of your transversus abdominis muscle, which needs the strengthening, is not worked at all by these exercises.

Actually, it’s even worse than that. Sit-ups and crunches actually throw transversus abdominis out of a job. With its job permanently taken over by the other belly muscles, transversus abdominis actually withers away.

When you want it to start working again, it can’t: it’s become far too weak.

2. Your right muscle is too weak

Since doing sit-ups and crunches weakens your true core strength muscle, sit-ups and crunches should be banned.

However these exercises are not the only reason why you over-use the wrong belly muscles. The main reason is that it’s become a habit. You have gotten so used to doing it that you probably have no idea what you should be doing instead.

Why do you develop this habit of using the wrong belly muscles?

Why you habitually use the wrong muscles

There are two major reasons why you habitually use the wrong belly muscles.

The first reason is that you try to pull your belly in and look thinner. Not understanding how your belly muscles work, you use the wrong muscles. Ultimately, pulling your belly in doesn’t work.

The second reason is that you habitually use those wrong belly muscles is yet another habit. You have a habit of leaning backwards from the waist. If you’ve read my other articles, you’ll have seen me mention that before.

Once you lean backwards from the waist, you have to also tighten your belly muscles to stop yourself toppling over backwards. So why do you lean backwards?

The power of a habit comes from the fact that not doing it feels wrong. The habit of leaning backwards is so strong, if you stop doing it, you typically feel like you’re leaning forwards at an angle of 30 degrees or more. That’s why people find it difficult to stop leaning backwards even once they realise what’s going on.

All this habitual wrong use of your belly muscles adds up to no core strength.

Building your core strength

Building back your core strength depends both on things you need to stop doing and on other things you need to do instead.

Things you need to stop doing:–

You need to stop pulling your belly in.
You need to stop leaning backwards from the waist.
You need to stop breathing and let yourself be breathed instead. That’s a whole other article so, for now, we’ll just say you need to avoid deliberately doing anything to your breathing.

Things you need to start doing:–

You need to start stretching your over-shortened belly muscles.
You need to start standing more on your heels.

1. Stretching your over-shortened belly muscles

The belly muscle stretch is a very simple stretch. You need a support about three inches high. You can buy yoga bricks made of high-density foam for this purpose. In the meantime, a small pile of books will serve you just fine.

This is how you do it:–

Lie down on the floor in semi-supine. (See earlier articles if you don’t know how).
Push your bottom up off the floor, take the three-inch high support and place it under the solid bony part of the base of your back.
While lying with the base of your spine thus supported off the floor, stretch your legs out. This will really stretch out those muscles in your lower belly.
Stay there for between five and fifteen minutes.

What will that do for you?

When you roll over and get up you’ll probably feel very stretched out in front. Notice also how your belly sucks in all by itself. Let me know if you don’t find these things happen for you.

For a while, sitting and standing tall will be much easier, indeed effortless. That’s because you’re no longer pulling your chest down into your hips. You’re now using your belly to support it.

When that happens, you’ve changed from being a Michelin man with a stomach cramp into a proper bouncy, carefree Michelin man. You’ll be able to sit and stand tall and straight without effort and without bracing your shoulders back.

In one way, though, you will be not more but less like the Michelin man than before: your belly will not stick as much.

This pleasant state of effortless straightness will not stay with you very long. Your old habits will take over again. To make a habit of your effortless straightness, you need to change a few more things. The most important such change is to stand more on your heels.

2. Standing more on your heels

Using your heels more is a big subject and I’ve written about it in detail elsewhere. See the list of the relevant articles below. Using your heels is an essential part of learning to stop leaning backwards and therefore an essential part of learning to stand straight without stiffening your shoulders.

None of these changes of habit are easy to learn, though. You have been relying on these right-feeling but disastrous habits for most of your life. It is very difficult to stop relying on them without someone to keep pointing out how your best attempts are still falling into the same old traps. Ultimately you would be well advised to have a course of Alexander lessons. You won’t know what you’re missing until you do.

Action plan

Remember what you need to stop doing (see above).
Stretch your belly with the yoga block
Use your heels. Here are the articles you need to read:–
1. “How to use your feet to detect body-stiffness”
2. “How to be ‘in the zone’ when working at your desk”
If it all possible, have at least a few Alexander Technique lessons. A few lessons are wonderful. More are even better. You won’t know what you were missing until you have them.

This article is included under the following categories:‒

Personal Coaching by Philip Pawley

If you want to get the best kind of help, come to me for an introductory lesson in Liverpool.

If you’re too far away, then the next best thing is to get personal lessons and advice from me online at Repoise.com, my on-line school. (Both far-away and local pupils use Repoise).

In more detail:–

If you’re in Liverpool (or can get to Liverpool)

There’s nothing better than individual lessons. My practice is at 37 Hope Street, Liverpool L1. Ring me on 0151 708 6172 to book an initial consultation and first lesson. (Leave your number so I can get back to you).
If you’re short of funds, you can still have first class training from me — though it will require a little more work on your part.

The thing to do is have an individual, in-person lesson just once a month. That will entitle you to also get regular on-line lessons from me through Repoise. That way, you have the best of both worlds: in-person lessons and very regular, even daily, on-line Personal Coaching by Philip Pawley from me. That’s a real bargain because Repoise costs the equivalent of three lessons a year to everyone else.

Ring me on 0151 708 6172 if you want to arrange this.
I occasionally run group lessons. If you’re interested in these, go here for details.

If you’re further away and can’t get to Liverpool

There’s still nothing better than individual lessons. Here’s where you can find a teacher near you in the UK or elsewhere
I suggest you also get direct day-to-day guidance from me by joining Repoise.
If you’re having plain Alexander Technique lessons from someone else, you still need to discover the Smiling Back Method of the Alexander Technique. You’ll get a lot more out of your lessons when you do.

37 Hope Street, Liverpool, Merseyside L1 9EA, England
Telephone: +44 151 708 6172 Mobile: +44 7872 905 154

Philip Pawley

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