Dead Wrong - Sucked In

I received the following email yesterday from Jason Krantz www.sonicboomgolf.com

Been reading your book and have to say you've really got my wheels turning. Was doing some thinking and came across a question that challenges one of the first things I learned from you.

Back at the ripe old age of 17 (can you believe it's been 9 years already?) I went to your seminar "Building And Rebuilding The Athlete" in Oak Brook. During that presentation I remember being introduced to the principle of the "core". One of the exercises we did was the "sucking in" maneuver.

I remember hearing that you should use this maneuver when exercising in order to strengthen the core. I've read this in many different places and have done it for years.

I was playing flag football the other day and made an awesome cut to completely roast a guy for a TD. After I scored, I was walking back and was thinking that everything I did to make that cut was automatic, it just happened. I didn't have time to think about "Ok, before I roast this guy, let's activate the core by sucking in so I can make a good lateral shift."

My question: In sports it is probably very rare (if ever) that an athlete (or at least myself) would be thinking of activating the core during a competition or even during intense practice. If this were true for most athletes, why would it still be important to consciously "activate the core" by sucking in during training if it isn't actually consciously done during competition?

After thinking about this for a while I'm not so sure that "core activation" is such a critical training point after all.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Jason here are my thoughts I was dead wrong. I literally got sucked into the whole drawing in idea. An example of one of the many times I did not use good common sense and let an isolated research study influence my thinking. I have posted several times on this over the past year. Abdominal bracing is natural, that is what you did in the touch football game, you did not think about it and you should not think about it. Beware of people that that are giving complicated cognitive cues for what are essentially reflexive actions. There are people that have build whole core programs around this so called “drawing in” maneuver and have sucked in a lot people along with them. Essentially if anyone is spending any significant amount of time on this it is a waste of time. Make it basic and simple. If you were a caveman and were being chased by a saber tooth tiger (obviously a life threatening situation) you would not have to draw in before you planted a foot in order to stabilize the core. If you did think about it you would be a saber tooth tiger happy meal.