Breath Support - Transversus Abdominus Crunches

Major element of Breath Support = Abs (more specifically, the Transversus Abdominus)

It can be difficult to get a sense of where the Transversus is because it is the deepest ab muscle. Most crunches work the surface muscles, the Rectus Abdominus. Here is a tweak to move some of the work to the Transversus so that you can feel where it is and how it works. (This is the Core muscle that Pilates work is targeting so much of the time.) 

Breath Support = Abs?

What I want to do is I want to clarify something about breath support. I've encouraged you to think about breath support equals abs. Breath support = abs. And getting more specific than that, it's the transversus abdominis which is involved in breath support.

So most of the time when you're doing a crunch, when you're doing sort of a traditional situp crunch, where you're lifting your shoulder blades off of the floor, what you're actually working is your rectus abdominis, and those are your ab muscles that go up and down.

Then you also have your internal and external obliques, which move at these angles, which is what you're working when you do some sort of a twisting thing.

The hard one to get at is the transversus, which is down lower underneath and runs across your body in this direction, sort of like a belt across your body.

Breath Support = Transverse?

Now in order to shift a regular crunch from being about purely the rectus abdominis to being about the transversus abdominis or the transverse or the transversus or whatever, right? So the belt one there that we want to get at, the core, what you do is instead of doing a crunch regularly you just do a little pelvic tuck. So it's as though I'm going to flatten out my back a little bit into the floor.

If I exaggerate it it's a big old pelvic thrust kind of thing, right? But I don't need to go that far. It really can be almost not visible for you. It's a tiny movement. And if you make that shift, instead of a traditional crunch, doing that crunch now is much harder because it's moving a lot of the work to the transversus, which isn't used to doing this nearly as much.

You can do a similar thing with your legs in the air, where you maybe cross at the ankles, and you can do some crunches there, which will primarily work the rectus abdominis.

But if you just do a little pop, think of lifting your butt slightly off the floor or bringing your knees slightly more towards your head, that will tend to engage the transversus going across and make whatever you're doing, focus more of the work on the transverses, and then it's not just the rectus abdominis working.

So that transversus is the muscle that we want to get going for breath support. We want to be aware of that little belt, low, engaging for breath support for when we are speaking, for especially feeling a punch maybe when you say an operative or an important word.