[This is a guest blog by Jonte Brown. Jonte is a graduate of Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, NC with a degree in Sport Management and is currently serving as an Athletic Development Intern at Athletic Lab.] Athletes are constantly working to find new ways to train in order to better their performances at a given sport. This is achieved through different strength and conditioning programs that involve some strengthening of the core. Does core strength and stability help improve performance in athletic competition settings? Core stability relates to the bodily region bounded by the abdominal wall, the pelvis, lower back and diaphragm, spinal extensor muscle, and its ability to stabilize the body during movements. Core stability is rarely the main component of an athletic development program. Rather, a part of a larger overall fitness routine. There are mixed results when it comes to this question on core strength and athletic performance. The lower extremity studies it focused on the lower limb effects of core strengthening, because the core is closely associated with the hip joints, and the crucial role it plays in the stabilization and energy transfer from the lower limb through the the body during movements in squatting and sprinting. Some athletes showed improvements in sport specific skills such as rotational swings, ball velocity and club head velocity in golf, rotational swings tennis players, 40-yard dash sprinters and some baseball pitchers and batters, while some in other sports showed no improvements. The same has been shown for the upper extremities as well. The population of these studies included males and females competing at various levels in the sports of baseball, handball and golf. In 2007, a coach implemented a 12-week medicine ball [...]