For a bodybuilder, training muscles that you can’t show often seems uninteresting, but appearances can be deceiving here. By developing your ‘core’ muscles, your body can handle much more than it currently can. Your balance improves, your posture gets better, and you can handle heavier weights as a result.
Additionally, you also reduce the risk of injuries. A problem with many bodybuilders is that they have well-developed muscles on a weak foundation. It may not seem like a problem now, but you see the difference when they are on stage; the bodybuilder who has developed everything looks more complete and streamlined.
Core Training with the Swiss Ball
You train your core muscles (midsection, lower back, and hips) best on an unstable surface. This is because your body tries to maintain balance to prevent falling, thereby engaging muscles that are otherwise much harder to reach. You can compare it to bench pressing on a machine versus bench pressing on a bench with a barbell. The machine ensures that balance is always maintained, allowing you to focus on the specific muscle group you want to train.
However, if you grab a free weight, your body calls upon various small muscles to help maintain balance. If you want to feel the instability even more, try bench pressing with dumbbells!
So, you want to develop your core muscles better and reap the benefits (a stronger foundation, better balance and posture, and reduced risk of injuries). How do you go about it?
Core Training with the Swiss Ball
The most common way is to perform abdominal exercises on a Swiss Ball (also known as a Swiss ball, exercise ball, training ball, power ball, fit ball, etc.) with or without the assistance of a medicine ball (weighted ball). The Swiss Ball is a large inflatable ball that you can lie on, sit on, and hang from while doing your exercises. Because the ball always yields slightly and naturally doesn’t stay stable due to its round shape, your body is constantly engaged in balancing – stabilizing – itself. You can solve this instability caused by the round shape by using a separate ‘base,’ but that, in my opinion, defeats the purpose of the ball…
Many upper body exercises can be done using the Swiss Ball. For example, if you do seated dumbbell curls on the ball, your entire body remains engaged in stabilizing. Additionally, the ball is also used as a seat while working at a desk.
You can do almost any exercise on the Swiss Ball that involves sitting or lying down, but for training your core muscles, it’s best to focus on exercises targeting the abdomen and lower back. I’ll give you three targeted exercises that address these areas.
Swiss Ball Crunches (especially upper abdominal muscles)
Lie with your head, shoulders, and back on the ball with your feet flat on the ground. Cross your arms over your chest (Jay Cutler keeps his thumbs against his forehead, give it a try). Tighten your inner abdominal muscles by moving your hips slightly forward and pulling your navel in. Slowly bend your upper body upwards and stop just before sitting upright. Then return to the starting position slowly.
Swiss Ball Leg Tuck (all abdominal muscles, straight, oblique, and transverse)
Lie down as if you’re going to do a push-up (hands directly under your shoulders, and let your shins rest on the ball. Pull in your abdominal muscles and slowly bring your feet with straight legs towards your head and lift your buttocks up until your body forms an inverted V shape.
Hold for a moment and slowly bring your buttocks back down and let the ball roll back until your body is completely straight again.
Ball Bridges (lower back and buttocks)
Lie on your back with your arms at your sides and your feet on the ball. Slowly lift your buttocks off the ground until your upper body and legs form a straight line. Hold for a moment and tighten your lower back muscles and buttocks. Then slowly lower down again.
There are entire books dedicated to exercises with the Swiss Ball, so I’ll leave it at these exercises for now.
If you want to target your core muscles even more effectively, you’ll need to do exercises that involve twisting your torso. These can be sit-ups with a twist, but it gets more interesting if you use a medicine ball, which is a kind of weighted basketball. By moving the ball from side to side with your arms while balancing on the Swiss Ball, your core muscles will be heavily engaged.
Purchasing a Swiss Ball
When purchasing a Swiss Ball, make sure you get the right size! There are Swiss Balls with various diameters, and it depends on your height which size you need. You can use the following recommendations:
If you are shorter than 1.70 meters, buy a ball with a diameter of 55 cm. If you are between 1.68 and 1.88 meters, a 65 cm diameter is the best choice. If you are taller, then you’re stuck with a 75 cm diameter. It’s possible to buy even larger ones, but they’re not easy to find in the Netherlands.
