• Fitness & Health
• Sport & Exercise Science
• Physical Education
• Strength & Conditioning
• Sports Medicine
• Sport Management
• Dance

Importance of Bracing and How to Do It

This is an excerpt from Rock Solid Resilience by Dean Robert Somerset & Daniel Pope.

Before we dig into the nuts and bolts of assessments, we’ll explore a fundamental concept that will be used consistently throughout any training program we put together: bracing and core tension. Bracing plays a couple of roles when it comes to weight training:

• Stabilization of the spine while under load
• Connecting the hips and rib cage to allow efficient force transfer between the lower body and upper body, and vice versa
• Management of blood pressure with changes in intra-abdominal pressure
• Increasing force production through the limbs compared to force production without bracing.

The spine is really just a stack of blocks held together with some ligaments and discs, so it needs a lot of muscle activity to move, hold position, and generate force when moving weights. Learning to brace effectively has two benefits: it can create better performance and also protect you against negative outcomes from training, such as injury or soreness.

There are different ways to brace depending on the loading you’re using, the duration of the activity, and whether you want a max effort squeeze, rapid pulsed tension, or just a sustained hold. But regardless of which way you brace, the rules are the same. You want to find a way to get all the abdominal muscles to tense in what’s known as a 360-degree brace, meaning all the muscles, from your back to your sides to your front, work together to build tension and stability through the torso. This bracing shouldn’t cause you to change your posture—it should just increase tension all around. If you brace and find yourself flexing forward, you’re relying on your anterior abdominal muscles and not using enough of the lateral or posterior muscles to generate that tension.

Your ability to lift heavier weights is directly related to whether you have the core strength and bracing power to lift that weight. The heavier the load, the less you want your spine to shift during the movement. This comes down to two primary factors. First, the muscles of the spine aren’t massive force producers like your glutes or the muscles of your shoulders. They’re designed to hold and allow small movements. Second, the vertebral segments typically have a relatively small range of motion, and exceeding this movement while under load can cause some serious issues. Small movements under load should be manageable for everyone, but as the load increases, the margin of error tends to shrink. The goal of any strength training program is to use a lot of load, so bracing is a fundamental concept for successful lifting.

Let’s dig into how you can develop a strong abdominal brace and how you can apply it to your lifting, plus test out whether you have a strong brace already or need to do some work to get yours up to speed.

Bracing With and Without Breathing

There are two slightly different bracing strategies, and they relate to whether or not you plan to maintain your brace while breathing or while holding your breath. For activities with a very high threshold, you need a bracing strategy that allows you to draw from your diaphragm and pelvic floor muscles, which means you’ll have to hold your breath during the reps. This technique, called a Valsalva maneuver, can be very effective when pushing very heavy loads.

If you’re doing more reps or using a level of force application that isn’t quite maximum but is still constant, such as carrying a load across the gym floor or carrying something up a hill, you’ll want to use a bracing strategy that allows you to breathe so you don’t pass out. A challenge with bracing and breathing simultaneously is that they work against each other in some ways. The harder the brace, the harder it is to get a full breath, and the reverse is also true: the easier it is to get a full breath, the less effective your bracing strategy.

Bracing While Breathing

Let’s start with the easier option, bracing while breathing. Start by getting all the muscles around your midsection to flex at the same time. There should be tension, but not maximum effort. On an intensity scale of 1 through 10, where 1 is awareness that muscles are working and 10 is an out-of-body experience with a soul-ripping, earth-shattering, muscle-cramping intensity never before seen in this world, to correctly brace while breathing the level of intensity should be 2 to 4. The muscles are “on,” but it’s kind of a casual contraction.

Now comes the challenging part. Try to maintain this brace as you inhale, getting as much air as possible without losing that level of tension you started with. During inhalation, the diaphragm descends (figure 2.1), pushing into the abdominal cavity and possibly pushing the ab wall forward. Thus, maintaining a brace against this ab wall movement while inhaling is a challenge for some of us. Breathing while bracing can be achieved by switching from abdominal expansion to more rib expansion. Think of lifting the upper chest and letting the ribs expand out to the sides when you inhale versus letting the abdomen expand (figure 2.2). This will help you maintain the brace while still getting some air. When you exhale, maintain the brace and let the chest and ribs return to the starting position.

If you can maintain core bracing while completing a full breath cycle like this, you can rock a more intense brace, so try to increase how hard you squeeze the core muscles to gradually increase the intensity to a 6 or 8, and see if you can still breathe. At the lower intensity, if you can’t get the breathing down without losing your bracing, spend some more time trying shallow breaths while bracing, and gradually increasing breath volume while bracing.

A good goal with your bracing and breathing is to be able to generate as much abdominal tension as possible through the 360-degree brace while still being able to draw in air without losing or adjusting the tension of the brace, and to maintain this bracing for up to 30 seconds.

Bracing Without Breathing

For a brace without breathing, we’re going to go for 360-degree bracing. Start with the moderate level of bracing, then take in the biggest air you can. When getting this big air, you can let the abdomen expand as far as possible. Once your lungs are as full as possible, try to pressurize (“lock down”) your lungs by closing your mouth and squeezing your abs. The goal is to develop the maximum amount of tension and abdominal pressure, and to hold this tension for 5 to 10 seconds. When you release, try to exhale slowly while maintaining some core tension, rather than going completely limp and sighing your breath away. Push the air out through pursed lips to modulate pressure, since a rapid drop in core pressure will also cause a fairly quick drop in blood pressure, which could leave you feeling lightheaded, or possibly cause you to faint. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

A good starting goal when learning this form of bracing is to be able to do 2 or 3 reps of full inhales and Valsalva holds for 5 to 10 seconds each. If you can manage that, you’re ready to rock with some heavy weights. If you can’t maintain that tension or find holding it for that long a big challenge, just practice until you’re accustomed to finding that tension and maintaining it over time.

More Excerpts From Rock Solid Resilience

---