Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Video
Video: Squat and reach with fitness ball
By Mayo Clinic staffTranscript
Nicole Krupa: Core exercises strengthen your core muscles, including the muscles in your abdomen and your back. You can do many core exercises with a fitness ball. Let's try the squat and reach.
Hold the fitness ball in front of you and bend your knees into a squat position. Keep your back straight and your arms parallel to the floor. Don't let your knees extend beyond your feet.
To begin the exercise, tighten your abdominal muscles. Keeping your knees bent, rotate your trunk and reach with the ball to the left. Hold for three deep breaths. Return to the starting position and repeat to your right.
To vary the exercise, you can hold the fitness ball in a downward position, like this, or in an upward position, like this.
If you're just starting out, repeat the exercise five times on each side. Remember to breathe freely and deeply throughout your exercise, and keep the abdominal muscles nice and tight. As you get stronger, gradually increase to 10 to 15 repetitions on each side.
