What Is the Core, Really? The Truth About Core Strength, Back Pain, and Your Body's Hidden Center
When most people hear the word "core," they picture abs. Maybe a six-pack, maybe a plank, maybe someone doing crunches on a gym mat. But the real core is a completely different thing — and understanding it might explain why your back hurts, why you feel unstable, and why no amount of sit-ups seems to make a difference.
This episode of Feeling Good Feels Good breaks the whole thing down.
Where Did the Word "Core" Even Come From?
The term "core stability" didn't come from fitness culture. It came from clinical rehabilitation in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia began studying muscle activation patterns in people with and without chronic back pain.
What they found changed how we think about the spine. In healthy people, a deep abdominal muscle called the transversus abdominis activates automatically — just before any limb movement — to stabilize the spine. In people with back pain, that automatic activation was delayed or missing entirely. The body wasn't bracing before it moved. The scaffolding wasn't ready.
That discovery led researchers to identify a group of deep stabilizing muscles they called the local stabilizing system — the transversus abdominis, the multifidus, the pelvic floor, and the diaphragm. These muscles weren't designed to generate big movements. They were designed to control and protect the spine during movement. That system became what we now call the core.
From rehabilitation clinics the idea spread to Pilates, yoga, functional fitness, and eventually pop culture — where it got simplified into abs, crunches, and six-pack goals. The nuance got lost. The core became about how your stomach looks rather than how your body functions.
What the Core Actually Is
Think of your core not as a muscle but as a pressure-regulating cylinder. It has a top, a bottom, sides, a front, and a back — and every part of it matters.
The diaphragm forms the top. It's your primary breathing muscle, and it does far more than most people realize. The pelvic floor forms the bottom. It supports your pelvic organs and works in perfect coordination with the diaphragm to stabilize the base of your spine. The transversus abdominis wraps around your torso like a natural corset — your body's built-in weight belt. The multifidus runs along the spine and fine-tunes spinal alignment with every movement you make.
On top of that deep stabilizing layer sit the more familiar muscles — the obliques that control rotation and side bending, the rectus abdominis that most people think of first, the erector spinae that keep you upright and resist forward collapse. And just outside the core, the glutes and lats help transfer force between your upper and lower body.
The core isn't one muscle doing one job. It's a team working together — stabilizing, absorbing, transferring, and protecting with every single movement you make.
The Numbers Behind Back Pain
Here's why this matters at a scale most people don't fully appreciate.
About 80 percent of people will experience back pain at some point in their lives. Four out of five. For many it comes and goes. For others it becomes chronic, recurring, and life-limiting. Studies suggest that up to 70 percent of chronic low back pain is associated with core instability or weakness. When the deep stabilizing system isn't doing its job, the joints, discs, and ligaments have to pick up the slack — and they weren't built for it.
Run those numbers together and you're looking at more than half the population dealing with some degree of core dysfunction at some point in their lives. This isn't just a fitness issue. It's a public health issue that shows up in doctor's offices, chiropractor's offices, and physical therapy clinics every single day.
Why Everyday Life Quietly Destroys Your Core
Here's the part nobody talks about. You don't have to be injured or sedentary to develop a weak core. Most of us are living in ways that chip away at core function without realizing it.
Desk work is the obvious one. Sitting for hours with the hips in constant flexion, the pelvis tucked, and the spine rounded places the deep stabilizers in a position where they barely need to engage. Over time they weaken from underuse. Even if you exercise for an hour a day, eight to ten hours of sitting is still reinforcing poor mechanics.
Driving adds another layer. The seated position is similar to desk work but worse — there's vibration, there's asymmetry from working the pedals, and the upper body tension from gripping a wheel disrupts natural breathing patterns. Which brings us to the piece most people completely overlook.
Breathing. Your diaphragm is part of your core. When you're under chronic stress, breathing becomes shallow and chest-driven rather than diaphragmatic. That dysregulates the natural rhythm between the diaphragm and pelvic floor — both essential for core function. Over time this leads to tension, weakness, and in some people pelvic floor dysfunction.
Add phone use — hours of forward head posture and a slumped spine that mechanically disadvantages the core — and a generally sedentary lifestyle, and you have a perfect storm for a core that simply isn't firing the way it should.
Signs Your Core Isn't Doing Its Job
You might recognize some of these without having ever connected them to your core.
Back pain when lifting — even light objects — is one of the most common signs. If the deep stabilizers aren't bracing your spine before the movement, the low back muscles take over. They're not designed for that role and they let you know.
Have you ever watched someone get up from a chair and use their hands on their knees to push themselves up? That's a core compensation pattern. The body is recruiting the arms and upper body because the core isn't generating enough stability to stand from a seated position on its own. It's one of the clearest visible signs of core dysfunction and it's extremely common.
Chronic neck and shoulder tension is another one. When the core isn't supporting your posture from the center, the upper body works overtime to keep you upright. That shows up as tightness that never fully resolves no matter how much you stretch your neck.
Shallow breathing, balance issues, digestive discomfort, and a persistent sense that your body feels unstable or "off" can all trace back to core dysfunction as well.
What Gets Better With a Functional Core
The flip side is worth spending time on because it's genuinely remarkable how many things improve when the core starts working properly.
Posture improves — not because you're forcing yourself to sit up straight, but because your body is naturally better supported. The spine is stabilized, the pelvis finds neutral, and the head and shoulders stack more easily.
Back pain decreases. Movement becomes more resilient. Everyday tasks — lifting, twisting, reaching, getting up from the floor — stop feeling like risks.
Breathing improves. When the diaphragm and pelvic floor are coordinated, you breathe more efficiently and more deeply. People with chronic core dysfunction often breathe in shallow patterns that keep their nervous system in a low-grade stress state. A functioning core helps break that cycle.
Force output improves in every athletic or physical pursuit — running, lifting, swimming, throwing — because the core is literally the center of power transfer. A weak center means energy leaks in every direction. A strong center means that energy goes where you intend it to go.
Even digestion and pelvic health can improve. The core and the abdominal organs share space and pressure. When intra-abdominal pressure is better regulated, the system works more smoothly.
Can Your Core Be Too Tight?
Yes. And this surprises people.
A constantly braced, rigid core sounds like a good thing but it's often just as limiting as a weak one. Some people — especially athletes or people under chronic stress — develop a habit of over-bracing all the time. The result is stiffness, reduced mobility, and breathing dysfunction. A healthy core isn't about being rock-solid constantly. It's about adaptability. Your core should know when to fire up and when to let go. If it can't relax, it can't move with you — and that creates its own set of problems.
The Core as an Emotional Center
This is the part of the episode that tends to surprise people the most.
Somatic therapists — practitioners who work with the body as a gateway to emotional healing — often observe that the core is where we store tension, stress, and unprocessed experience. This isn't abstract. It shows up physically as shallow breathing, chronic belly tension, and guarding in the pelvic floor. The nervous system uses the body to protect us — and the center of the body is where that protection often lives.
The diaphragm is deeply connected to both breathing and emotion. When we're anxious, our breath becomes shallow and tight. When that becomes habitual, the body can get stuck in a low-grade stress response. The pelvic floor is associated with grounding, release, and control — and it's a common area for holding tension related to fear or vulnerability.
This is why practices like somatic experiencing, Feldenkrais, and certain forms of yoga focus heavily on breath and awareness in the core region. The goal isn't just to relax muscles — it's to help the body feel safe enough to release what it's been holding. When people experience that release, they often describe feeling more grounded, more emotionally resilient, and more at home in their bodies.
The Core in Traditional Chinese Medicine
Traditional Chinese Medicine offers a completely different — and equally compelling — lens on the core.
In TCM, the lower abdomen just below the navel is called the Lower Dan Tian. It's considered the body's energy reservoir, the place where Qi — life force — is stored and cultivated. Tai Chi, Qi Gong, and acupuncture practices all center around building awareness and energy in this region. Movements originate from the Dan Tian. Breathing is directed toward it.
The core in TCM connects to the kidney and spleen meridians — which relate to vitality, digestion, and stress regulation. Imbalances in this area can show up as fatigue, digestive issues, and emotional instability. The goal isn't just strength or stability. It's flow and harmony between opposing forces.
What's remarkable is that this framework was developed thousands of years before modern rehabilitation science identified the same region as the center of physical stability. Two completely different ways of understanding the human body arrived at the same conclusion from entirely different directions.
The Core Isn't Just About Abs
If there's one thing to take from this episode it's that the core is far more than a fitness concept.
It's where your spine is stabilized before every movement. It's where your breath is generated and regulated. It's where tension and stress often live in the body. It's the energetic center of the body in ancient healing traditions. And for most people it's the single most important system to understand and address when something in the body isn't working right.
Whether you're dealing with chronic back pain, trying to move and perform better, or just trying to understand why your body feels the way it does — the core is usually somewhere in that conversation.
Feeling good feels good.
This post is based on Episode 10 of the Feeling Good Feels Good podcast with Dr. Zachary Tripp. Listen on Spotify or watch on YouTube.
