When I’ve been doing my Pilates teacher training with the APPI recently, the idea of anatomical muscle slings has been at the centre of my learning. These are muscle groups broken up in to functional groups that work together to achieve stability.
In this blog I’m going to focus on the anterior oblique sling, why it’s important and what you can do to strengthen it.

The anterior oblique sling is made up of your oblique abs and inner thigh adductor muscles from opposite sides of the body, connecting with your fascial tissue. They work together when you’re using your upper and lower limb in opposition to one another – like walking, where you naturally swing your opposite arm and leg at the same time.
When we’re walking, your slings work reciprocally with one another to provide stability. Essentially, we use these muscles to stop us collapsing through the front of our bodies and ending up on the floor!
If you challenge the sling by bringing a leg out to the side, like we do in rotational sports like tennis, hockey and golf – you can sometimes run into trouble if you have weakness in the muscles that make up the anterior oblique sling. That’s when a treatment plan should advance from pain relieving hands on work, to preventative muscle training.

From a sports performance point of view, anything where we are required to rotate, decelerate or change direction will recruit the muscles of the anterior oblique sling – so the better control you can have of these muscles, the better you will perform!

You can strengthen this sling with any cross-body strengthening that focuses on your tummy or inner thigh muscles working at the same time. Pilates exercises are great for this, because they involve limb dissociation from a stable base – so that means, holding your core strong while you move your arms and legs away.
Your osteopath, Pilates teacher, or personal trainer can show you exercises to energise the anterior oblique sling, and improve the stability of your lower back, pelvis and hips.