The foam roller has been receiving lots of fitness love lately. This piece of equipment has long been known as a stand-out recovery tool which helps to relieve tense muscles as well as tight fascia. In addition, experts recommend it as a way to warm up and get your blood flowing before a workout.
Now there’s another great reason to have a foam roller by your side. This is that it can seriously strengthen your core. This is because the foam roller creates an unstable surface, which means more core muscles need to work in order to make sure that you’re kept stable.
Foam Roller Exercises For Your Core
Alternating Heel Tap
- Lie face-up with a foam roller vertically under your spine.
- Place your fingertips onto the floor as you lift legs into tabletop position.
- Maintaining a 90-degree angle, tap your heels to the floor one at a time.
To make this exercise harder, tap your heels faster and then keep lower abdominals firing by pressing your low back firmly into the foam roller. The muscles targeted are your obliques (side ab muscles), glutes as well as your lower back
Side Plank With Leg Raise
Talk about hitting every muscle of your midsection! You’ll work into the transverse abdominis, rectus abdominis as well as obliques in addition to the quadratus lumborum. In addition, with the leg lift you’ll turn on your glutes and thighs.
How To Do This Exercise:
- Lie on your side. Make sure that you place your left hand on the middle of the foam roller.
- Lift up your hips so they’re in a diagonal line with your shoulders. Lift your right arm straight above you at your shoulder height.
- Lift the right leg up to the height of your hip, without lifting or lowering your hips.
- Return your foot to the ground. Then you need to repeat. Then switch sides.
Sawing plank
- Begin in a forearm plank with your wrists on the foam roller, hands clasped and your feet at hip width. Make sure your hips are level.
- Make use of your arms to rock back and forth slowly so the foam roller moves from wrists to elbows, challenging your stability.
This exercise targets your whole core as well as upper arms.
Push-Up
A regular push-up has nothing on this foam roller variation. You’ll very definitely feel the burn in trying to keep yourself steady.
How To Do The Push-Up:
- Put your hands shoulder-width apart on the middle of the foam roller and then begin in a high plank position.
- Bend your elbows (as you make sure that you keep them by your sides) and lower down your chest as close to the foam roller as you can.
- Push back up and then repeat.
Contact Trifocus Fitness Academy
Do you want to learn more about the foam roller? If you do then you need to do our Foam Rolling Course. To find out more and to book, please follow this link.
