Why Your "Core Work" Might Be Making Your Back Worse

What bracing costs you — and what to do instead

There is a version of core work that looks impressive, feels productive, and is quietly making your back angrier every time you do it. It shows up in gyms, in yoga studios, in private Pilates sessions. It has been handed out as homework by well-meaning practitioners for decades. And for a significant portion of the people reading this, it is possibly one of the reasons your back never quite gets better — no matter how consistent you are.

I want to be specific about what I mean, because "core work" is one of those terms that has been used so loosely it has almost stopped meaning anything. So let's be precise.

The problem with bracing

Somewhere along the way, "engaging your core" became synonymous with bracing — that hard, held, cinching-in sensation that a lot of people have been taught to maintain throughout their practice, their workout, or even just their daily movement.

The intention behind it is good. A stable spine needs muscular support. That part is true. The problem is which muscles bracing actually recruits — and which ones it doesn't.

Hard bracing preferentially activates the global movers: the rectus abdominis, the obliques, the erector spinae. These are the large, superficial muscles that produce force and generate movement. They are not, however, the muscles primarily responsible for spinal stability. That job belongs to the deep stabilizing system — the transverse abdominis, the multifidi, the pelvic floor — a system that operates at low levels of activation, continuously, in coordination with the breath. Bracing hard tends to override this system rather than recruit it. You get the sensation of effort without necessarily getting the stability you're after.

There is also a rigidity problem that goes beyond the spine. When you brace hard and hold it, you create whole-body tension — a locked ribcage, restricted hip mobility, and a nervous system that registers the sustained muscular effort as a threat signal. Movement quality deteriorates. Compensation patterns develop. The body finds ways to move around the braced core rather than through it, which is precisely the opposite of what a stable, fluid movement practice is trying to achieve.

And then there is the breath.

You cannot brace hard and breathe well at the same time. These are physiologically incompatible strategies. A rigid brace restricts the diaphragm's ability to descend fully on the inhale, which means the breath migrates upward into the chest, the lower ribcage stops expanding laterally, and the natural pressure rhythm that coordinates the deep stabilizing system is disrupted. Research from Hodges and Richardson — the foundational work on transverse abdominis function in low back pain — established that the deep stabilizers are activated in anticipation of movement, not in response to it, and that this anticipatory activation is breath-dependent. When the breath is restricted, that anticipatory timing breaks down.

What this means practically: the harder you brace, the less likely you are to be activating the system that actually stabilizes the spine. You are working hard at a strategy that bypasses the very muscles you need.

This is not a fringe position. It is consistent with the physiatric literature on motor control and low back pain going back more than thirty years. The shift from global bracing to deep stabilizer activation — from gripping to coordinating — is the clinical direction the evidence has been pointing for a long time. It just hasn't made it into most fitness cues yet.

The problem with long-lever core work

The other category worth addressing is the classic crunch family — and more specifically, the long-lever version. Legs extended, feet lifted, hands behind the head, the body essentially becoming a see-saw with the low back as the fulcrum.

This is the one that tends to produce that familiar deep ache in the lumbar spine that people describe as "feeling like I worked hard." Sometimes you did. Sometimes what you actually did was repeatedly load a flexion-intolerant structure under tension, and what you're feeling is not productive fatigue — it's irritation.

The physics here are not complicated. The further the load is from the spine, the greater the mechanical demand on the lumbar extensors and the discs. Long-lever movements amplify force. For a healthy spine with no history, that's manageable. For a spine with disc involvement, stenosis, or any kind of instability, it is a consistent and unnecessary provocation.

The goal of core work is to support the spine. Long-lever crunches, done regularly on a vulnerable back, tend to load it instead. And because these movements almost universally require a held breath or a hard brace to execute — you're back to the same problem. The global system is working. The deep system is still waiting to be asked.

What spine-safe core actually looks like

Here is what I am looking for when I cue core work in SAAL Yoga — and what makes it categorically different from what most people have been taught.

Support, not gripping. The goal is muscular support that stabilizes without locking. This means working the deep stabilizers — the transverse abdominis, the multifidi, the pelvic floor — rather than the global movers. These muscles don't produce the satisfying burn of a crunch. They don't photograph particularly well. They produce a spine that functions better, which is a different kind of result entirely.

Short lever, controlled load. The closer the load to the spine, the more manageable the mechanical demand. Knees bent. Feet supported. Range of motion earned, not assumed. This is not about being cautious for the sake of being cautious — it's about loading the system in a way it can actually adapt to, rather than just survive.

Breath as the driver, not the casualty. In SAAL Yoga, the breath isn't something that happens around the core work. It is the core work. The exhale naturally facilitates activation of the deep abdominal wall — the transverse abdominis draws in gently, the pelvic floor responds, the deep system engages in the coordinated, low-level way it was designed to. The inhale creates length. When you learn to sequence movement with breath rather than bracing through it, you are finally asking the right muscles to do their job — and giving them the conditions to actually do it.

Eccentric control over isometric gripping. Rather than holding a position hard, the focus is on controlling movement through a range — particularly on the way down, on the lengthening phase. Eccentric loading builds real functional strength. Sustained isometric gripping builds the habit of whole-body tension, which tends to migrate into daily movement and keep the nervous system in a low-grade state of activation it was never meant to maintain.

Try this right now — it takes two minutes

Lie on your back with your knees bent and your feet flat. Let everything go completely — no holding, no tucking, no organizing. Just land.

Place one hand on your lower belly, just inside your hip bones.

Now take a full breath in and let it go completely. On the next exhale, without sucking in or gripping, see if you can feel a very subtle, gentle drawing-inward sensation under your hand — like the lower belly quietly moving away from your fingers without any effort from the rest of you. No breath-holding. No rib-gripping. No visible change in your spine.

That sensation — quiet, low, almost underwhelming — is your transverse abdominis. That is the muscle your core work should be built around.

Now brace hard, the way you might have been taught. Feel what happens to your breath. Feel what happens to your ribcage, your jaw, your shoulders. Notice how far that tension travels from where it started.

That's the difference. One of these is stability. The other is effort pretending to be stability.

The post explains why that distinction matters clinically — and what to do with it.

The fix is not less core work

The answer is not to avoid core work. A supported spine needs strong, responsive stabilizers. That doesn't change with age or diagnosis — if anything it becomes more important, not less.

The answer is different core work. Work that actually recruits the system it's claiming to strengthen. Work that uses breath rather than sacrificing it. Work that builds the deep stabilizers, not just the superficial layer that registers as effort.

That is what a spine-informed practice is doing, even on the days it doesn't look like much. Especially on those days.

P.S. If you have been doing core work consistently and your back is still not improving, this is worth a closer look. Not everything that feels like effort is moving you forward. Sometimes the most useful thing is identifying what to stop before adding anything new. A strategy call is a good place to start.