Dr. Andy Galpin

And then how do I intervene?

And so friends, here we go with our very first I, and that is how do I investigate?

How do I measure?

How do I know if my core is strong enough?

Well, there's no direct answer here because of some of the things I just said.

You probably don't want to do a one repetition max setup.

I can't think of a situation in which I've ever done that.

So it's a little bit different than your quads or your hamstrings.

But you can take this from the same perspective of is it a movement that I want to test or is it an actual muscle itself?

Most people will do movement type of testing.

And there's some common ones, some classic ones.

One I've used actually for many years, we did all the testing for the Anaheim Ducks, the hockey team, as well as the LA Kings.

This happened in our lab probably, I don't know, seven or eight years in a row.

And we would do like this off-season testing.

All the players would come in and we would look at this.

And one of the tests we always do is called a Bering-Sorensen trunk extension test.

It's really cool.

But imagine laying on your stomach on a table and then you scoot all the way off the table till only your waist and legs are on the table and your upper body is hanging off.

So if you would just relax, your upper body would fall forward and your body would be in like a 90 degree angle with your head pointing towards the ground.

So what the extension test does, and it's really a muscular endurance test, says, okay, raise your upper body up until your entire body is parallel to the ground and hold it as long as you can.