Transverse Abdominis Assessment & Facilitation

Now we're going to teach the transverse abdominis contraction. So what we're going to do here is I'm going to get the person to feel it first. So is it okay if I put my hands on your hips? All right. So I’m going to put my hands on her hips. I'm going to go from the ASIS and then inferior and medial. Okay. And then what I'm going to frequently do here is I'm just going to ask her to cough. So go ahead and cough for me. All right. Do you feel those muscles kind of pushing up into my hands? That's that little transverse abdominis muscle, that inner core muscle that we've been talking about. What I want to teach you how to do, we just contracted that reflexively. I want to teach you how to contract it on your own. So go ahead by gently bringing your belly button in towards your spine. Good. There we go. We're getting a little bit. We're getting a little bit, particularly on the right side there. The left isn't quite doing as well. So what we're going to do is we can do some things to help facilitate that. So go ahead and what I want you to do is I want you to count slowly out. So I want you to string your numbers together. So I want you to go one, two, three. Go ahead and do that while you're trying to contract there. Good, good great. And now you're getting a much more equal contraction on the right and left side. So you can kind of feel that. You can also do things, the cough kind of when you're at home, that cough kind of resets and kind of gets you to feel what those muscles should be feeling like when they contract. I'm also, when I'm doing this, I'm feeling up on her obliques to make sure those aren't contracting. So that we truly are getting a local contraction, not a large global contraction.