Back Pain Treatment: 4 Core Exercises You Should Know

A Review of Four Core Routines and Their Effectiveness for Preventing or Treating Back Pain

September 06, 2013 | 24,308 views

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By Dr. Mercola

Aside from the food you eat, exercise is one of the most important factors in being free from chronic disease. It is also something that can be added to almost any lifestyle because there are so many different ways to get your daily exercise.

Pilates and yoga are two popular routines and each has benefits over and beyond strengthening your core. I’m also partial to Foundation Training, as it not only builds strong core muscles but also counteracts postural problems that can cause back pain.

The Gokhale Method also has distinct merits as it teaches you proper posture, which is critical to make the most out of every movement, in and outside the gym. If your posture is good, every movement you make becomes like a therapeutic exercise.

The featured article in The New York Times¹ reviews some of the differences between Pilates and yoga, which I’ll summarize here.

I’ll then address some of the added benefits of Foundation Training and the Gokhale Method, and why I believe Foundation Training may offer the best of all worlds in terms of building a strong core, eliminating back pain, and promoting optimal health that goes beyond fitness. It also decreases your risk of exercise injury.

While all four of these exercises help develop stability through your entire torso, Foundation Training and the Gokhale Method are particularly helpful if you want to prevent or treat back pain, as they both address fundamental posture issues that lie at the root of most pain.

Pilates—Great for Core Building, But May Fall Short if You Have Back Pain

The core strengthening fitness routine known as Pilates got its name from its creator, fitness trainer Joseph Pilates. Its balanced movements, which emphasize awareness of your body mechanics, help build core strength, flexibility and grace. As stated by Joseph Pilates himself, “It’s not about quantity, it’s about quality of the movement.”

Pilates can be done either on a floor mat or on specially designed Pilates equipment for increased resistance. The program is highly adaptable for a variety of fitness levels as it can be modified up or down in terms of difficulty.

There’s little doubt that it’s effective for targeting your core. Through a technique called “electromyography,” Auburn University researchers determined that 10 repetitions of the Pilates roll-up or double-leg stretch exercises activated the deepest abdominal muscles (i.e. transversus abdominis and internal obliques) better than 10 regular crunches.

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Back Pain Treatment: 4 Core Exercises You Should Know