When bracing your core for a farmer’s walk, you should focus on tightening your abdominal muscles without expanding your belly out or sucking it in. Here’s how to do it:
Stand Tall: Position yourself between your weights (in your case, buckets of sand).
Grip the Weights: Bend your knees slightly, lean forward, and grab the weights.
Engage Your Core: Imagine you’re about to get punched in the stomach. Tighten your abdominal muscles as if you’re creating a solid wall. This means neither pushing your belly out nor sucking it in completely.
Lift and Walk: Deadlift the weights by straightening your legs and standing up tall. Keep your shoulders back and down.
Maintain Posture: As you walk, keep your back straight and avoid leaning forward or backward. Focus on small, controlled steps.
Breathe Steadily: Take small, controlled breaths, similar to sipping through a straw, to maintain core stability.
Engaging your core can be done whether your lungs are full, empty, or anywhere in between, though it’s often easiest to feel with your lungs full.
Engaging your core is similar to the reflex action when someone is about to punch you in the stomach or the sensation in your abdomen during a cough or sneeze. In the pelvic floor, it’s like the feeling of trying to hold in urine or feces.
It’s impossible to take completely full breaths while engaging your core. To take a full breath, you need to relax these abdominal muscles to reduce the pressure in your thorax, allowing air to flow into your lungs. This is what people mean by “sipping breaths” – you can’t fully release your core muscles to breathe deeply.
