Why your core keeps switching off 🤔🧠

Why are our core muscles so weak?

If you think your CORE muscles are weak, you’re not alone 🫣. In fact, there’s a very well-established scientific explanation for why this has become such a global problem.

The most accepted theory is simple: we just don’t use our bodies the way our ancestors did. They walked, squatted, carried, climbed, and moved for most of the day, which kept their deep core muscles quietly switched on all the time. We, on the other hand, sit, drive, scroll, and slouch. Over time, the brain (and nervous system) stops bothering to recruit the muscles that stabilise the spine, and they gradually go "offline" (poetically framed). So what feels like weakness is often more like disconnection.

But I have another theory as well. Of course I do 🤔🤩

👇🏽

As a species, we are still caught mid-evolution. We have a spine that can’t quite decide whether it belongs to a knuckle-walking chimpanzee or a fully upright Homo sapiens. Are we meant to be on all fours with very little load going through the lower back? 🦍 Or upright, carrying the full weight of gravity through a curved spine?

The truth is, we’re somewhere in between.

This helps explain why our core muscles are, generally speaking, so pathetic, why they switch off so easily, and why they’re often the weakest muscles in the body and sometimes the first to fail. They are essential for modern upright humans, but because our spine is caught between two evolutionary designs, these muscles don’t really get the clear signal they evolved for. So we have to train them, over and over again.

This is where yoga, when taught properly, becomes powerful.

Research shows that slow, controlled movements against gravity (Chaturanga - when done right), balance poses (Half moon - when done right), activate the deep core more effectively than traditional abdominal crunches. Crunches train you to flex the spine. Yoga, at its best, trains you to stabilise it.

The simplest way to feel this is something I’ve mentioned many times. Before you lower down in Chaturanga, imagine a five year-old is about to punch you in the belly. You naturally brace your core. Now lower down without losing that feeling.

In Half Moon, imagine you’re wearing a corset. If that corset is just tight enough that you’re constantly aware of it, you begin to sense tiny changes in how you’re holding yourself. Those subtle adjustments strengthen the connection between your brain and your core 🧠.

Over time, that improves efficiency, reduces back pain, and makes you a far more capable Homo sapien - not by forcing your body, but by teaching it to remember what it was always designed to do.

Click the above links for the pose tutorials - try these at home and over time, you will notice the difference. I would bet my professional reputation on it 👍🏽

Namaskar

Zahir 👳🏾‍♂️

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