Core, Blimey!!

This is a Bosu...

All right, so my core strength sucks - whose doesn't? Well, my colleague Olga certainly has no problems in the core department - she's even training to be a core class instructor with Fitness First. So when I read in the Can Too training program that developing your core strength was a good thing for swimming, I asked Olga about coming to her class sometime and she very kindly let me attend a special session with her and a friend.

I got to become rather intimate with this thing called a Bosu in the core session.  And when I say intimate, I mean my feet, legs, knees, thighs, belly and arms took turns in trying to balance my crap body on this thing.  In the first bit of the session, the main objective was to stay on the Bosu and not fall flat on your face. Even though I expected I would suck big time at doing it, I was a bit surprised with how well I was doing with the balancing bits. It made me realise that my thigh muscles were heaps stronger since I'd been doing Pump classes for the past year.

However, my brief feeling of cockiness gave way when we got to the hard core (pun very intended) bit of the session, when we were doing floor work and actually getting to do crunches on the Bosu. Not only was it hard to balance on the Bosu, there was no escaping making your core muscles work to execute the crunch. No amount of cheating by using other muscles was going to work. There was also lots of kneeling down, which played havoc on my bad right knee. So even though I managed to do around two-thirds of the exercises (albeit not fry well quite yet!), the pain in my knee was just a bit too much to go on.

So even though I still need go get my core muscles firing, I think I might leave the core classes with the Bosu to the more balanced people of the population. Now back to doing bloody planks, which I absolutely detest but as they say, no pain, no gain!!!