My partner, Amelia, and I did our presentation on the core muscles and core exercise and you can find our presentation here. This is a topic that applies to our lives very heavily because we are dancers in the color guard and have to focus on core strength and having good posture while performing. Core strengthening is very different than regular strengthening because it has a larger influence on daly life and everyday tasks unlike regular muscle building activities. The activity we did in class with everyone was also very fun because it was rather simple, but it showed people the many different muscles the more is made up of and how to work out the major ones. We used a Pilates manual to find our exercises, and because my mum is an advanced pilates instructor she showed me how to do each exercise, where it should hurt, and what to focus on, which proved to be very useful and informative. In dancing, you are constantly told to “stay lifted” and she doing turns or just balancing to “use your core” so I have always known that the core was more than the abs because you couldn't keep balance with just abs.
In doing all of this research I learned that the core actually affects the lungs as well as the abdominals, obliques, and back muscles. It was cool to see how diverse the core actually was and to read about all the exact muscles that made up the core. There were so many exact muscles though that we couldn't really include all of the in our presentation to the class so we mentioned a few while doing the exercises. The core makes up all the muscles that aren’t your arms and legs so it is a vital part of every activity. Its used in literally all other exercises because your body needs to hold itself still to isolate the other muscle trying to work, causing you core to be engaged. Having a stronger core makes daily life a little easier to go about and increases flexibility as well since the stronger core you have, the less stress is put on the limbs, giving them more freedom to move around.
If I had to grade us on this presentation on a scale of one to ten, I would give us about a nine. I would say nine rather than an eight or a ten because we tried our best to make the information somewhat entertaining and interesting rather than turning it into a lecture practically in latin because of the many scientific names for the muscles. I wouldn't give us the full ten because we definitely could have spent more time defining the exact muscles of the core and saying, in detail, what everything is doing during the exercises. To get above the eight though, I feel like we made the activity and working out not as boring as it could have been because we played music in the background, we demonstrated the exercises and we tried to be interactive rather than purely telling them what to do.
My mum, being a Pilates instructor, has brought me to many of her classes. From those classes I have worked muscles in the core I didn't even know I had, and after those work outs, I did considerably notice my color guard dancing getting better and I was more flexible while I consistently did Pilates. I found from doing those classes and doing research on this project that everything in the body connects to everything else. The breathing exercises we did not only warmed up the core, but also relaxed people because it was like incorporating meditation into a workout by focusing on breath.
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