Stop Bracing Out! Hollowing Vs Bracing

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What’s the difference between drawing in, or abdominal hollowing, versus bracing? So when somebody says, "Draw in," what are you really working? And then when you hear the advice of you need to brace for this activity, what does that actually mean? And what is the difference in impact, on your pelvic floor and potentially diastasis? Let's dive into those and go over what they mean, and let's try them together.

I like to think about the two of those as preferentially contracting different abdominal muscles and level of contraction. When you think about drawing in, or abdominal hollowing, you think more navel to spine. You're going to draw in and you can get a little bit of lower, preferential lower TAs. If you contract the front of your pelvic floor and lift your belly button up, as you draw in. And then you can get upper TA, so you can get segmental TA contraction as you draw in and hollow. Now, if you do more than a very subtle drawing in, then you're going to also get your other abdominal muscles as well. A TA contraction is really small and really subtle.

When would I have somebody work on drawing in or lifting up of their lower abdominal, so that they're doing more, or creating more of an abdominal hollow-type maneuver? I would have somebody work on that if they have very weak transverse abdominals and they lack control during movements that require lots of abs to hold their spine still. If they're having a lot of trouble with bearing down or bracing out. If they have a tendency to bear down when they do something, then we probably want to retrain the system to hold more in.

Now, here's the deal, bracing is just going a little bit further with that contraction. I like to think about bracing is your kid running across the room and jumping on your belly. If you guys have kids, you know exactly what I'm talking about. I want you to imagine bracing being a knee to the belly. And that is going to be your difference. If you draw in your belly button, you're probably not going to want your kid to come and drop an elbow onto you flying off of the couch. That would hurt, it's going to push in a little bit too far. What you would do is brace, you would tighten further.

When you think about bracing, you can brace in different ways. Some people brace pushing out, they brace out. And oftentimes when this happens, you can brace down on the pelvic floor, which could contribute to making prolapse worse. And you can also contribute to doming out of your diastasis if the way you brace is out. When you have a pressure management problem, which is a diastasis or a prolapse, then you want to work on how you control the pressure in here, and part of that comes down to how you brace when you need your abs to fire.

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