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Lower back pain is a common ailment these days. This is largely due to our increasingly sedate lifestyle and the declining weakness of our postural muscles that invariably results.

The fitness industry goes through fashion trends and at present the flavour of the month is postural muscles. And the focus of much of this fashion is the transverse abdominis (or TA). What is it, and will a Swiss ball help it?

Your lower back is supported by a series of abdominal muscles. The TA stabilises the pelvis and controls your stability. This muscle plays a key role in supporting your spine and therefore eliminating any lower back pain. It sits around your belt line or belly button line effectively wrapping itself around your waist. The TA is generally hard to switch on unless you are strong and have been trained to do so.

In my experience the easiest way to locate the muscle is to try and stop yourself urinating (as disgusting as this sounds, your TA will co-contract and switch on). This will allow you to at least find and isolate the muscle and from there, you will be able to build and strengthen it.

Due to the insertion and origin of the TA it is impossible for it to contract in a normal exercise movement. Accordingly, it has no isotonic function. To counteract this we need to strengthen the TA with a static holding position, commonly called isometric training.

The Swiss balls we see in offices today and more commonly in gyms are great for doing these type of TA strengthening exercises. The ball offers an unstable environment, forcing you to work harder through your TA to balance. Even a basic exercise like sitting on the ball upright will place more stress on the TA.

Taking this to the next level can be quite fun as you try to lift 1 or 2 legs off the ground while sitting and still remain upright through your stomach muscles and lower torso. The ball is great for our spine and offers many different and fun ways to exercise.

A stronger TA encourages better posture simply through your increased awareness of the muscle. Pulling this muscle in and sitting upright out of a flexed spine will greatly reduce the pressure on your lower back discs thus saving you plenty of discomfort later on in life.