In today’s newsletter I wanted to open your eyes to the reality of core training and help you discover why it’s more than just sit ups and crunches.
Unfortunately there are still people that seem to think doing ab exercises will give them washboard abs. Unless you have single digit levels of body fat this just isn’t the case!
Everyone has abs but for most they’re covered in a layer of fat. If you want to see your abs then you need to lose the layer of fat first.
How do you lose the layer of fat?
Not by doing crunches. In fact there was a recent study that looked at the amount of crunches needed to burn 1 pound of fat (that’s less that 0.5 of a kg for us NZ’ers)
22000
No I didn’t add an extra zero. Twenty two thousand. If you wanted to burn 0.5kg (which isn’t really a lot) of fat a week you would have to perform 3143 crunches everyday.
That would be over an hour of crunching everyday. Pretty boring and incredibly inefficient.
Now, to answer the question ‘how to lose the layer of fat?
Step 1 – Nutrition
Step 2 – See step one
Step 3 – Resistance training
Step 4 – High intensity intervals
Step 5 – Traditional cardio methods
As you can see crunching for an hour didn’t make the cut. At this point you might be thinking why even do abdominal training?
Abdominal training is part of core training but maybe not like you think. First let’s talk about what muscles make up the core.
- Rectus abdominus (your six pack muscle)
- Internal and external obliques (the ones at the sides)
- Transverse abdominus (a coil like muscle under your rectus)
- Hip flexors
- Hip extensors (glutes, hammies)
- Spinal extensors (spinal erectors)
- Hip adductors (inner thigh)
- Hip abductors (outer thigh, side of glutes)
- Multifidus (little twin muscles that run up the side of your spine)
- The latissimus dorsi (the fan like muscle that spreads across your back. This muscle assists stabilising the pelvis and spine)
As you can see there are a lot of muscles that make up your core.
The most important goal of core training is to protect the spine
A spinal column without the supporting structures of the muscles and connective tissue is a jellied mess on the floor
A simple way to look at it is – your midsection is a stabiliser. It keeps everything locked and loaded in position while your arms and legs (limbs) are free to move. So core strength is essentially strengthening the foundation of your house (body).
If your core is weak then it’s like trying to shoot a cannon from a canoe – Not a good idea!
Alignment is everything
If your body is out of perfect alignment it’s like trying to drive a car with misaligned wheels. Performance decreases, handling becomes more challenging and you end up throwing money down the pan as you patrol (inefficiency) and your tyres (body) wears out quicker.
I am not going to go into too much detail on body alignments as that’s a big article in itself. But I will briefly say this.. The most common alignment dysfunction is anterior pelvic tilt or lordosis.
Anterior pelvic tilt
- Psoas (hip flexor) becomes short and tight
- Spinal erectors become short and tight
- Glutes are weak and elongated
- Abdominals are weak and elongated
Those in anterior pelvic tilt often have trouble stabilising the spine and will be very susceptible to back pain
- When you lift a weight from the floor the abdominals and lower back stabilise to protect the spine and the hips hinge to allow for movement. However in anterior tilt the hips are too tight to make the movement so the lower back takes over. The lower back becomes a mover not a stabiliser compromising one’s spine.
How we should train the abs
As I have mentioned in my previous two points the purpose of the abdominals are to protect the spine which is done by stabilisation.
To stabilise something effectively we must get good at resisting movement. Therefore the majority of your abdominal training program should be based around movement resistance. Note I said majority. Some experts in the field of abdominal training would have you do no movement based ab training. That’s no crunches of any form or no sit ups of any form and no back extensions.
I personally would argue that if we were not supposed to move from our abdominals then our creator would have designed us with a non moving mid-section. The fact that we have the ability to move tells me we should do some movement. Besides tell me how to get off the sofa when lying down without using your abs.
That said I believe the majority of your abdominal training should be based around movement resistance.
But what exactly is movement resistance?
Let’s take a plank
The plank is an anti-extension exercise. Essentially you are holding a static stable position and preventing your abdominals to start to sag (drop into extension)
A side plank is an anti lateral flexion exercise.
An anti lateral flexion exercise is one that prevents side bending.
A Pallof press is an anti-rotation exercise
Anti-rotation trains the core to stabilise and prevent rotating movements
A rugby scrum offers a good example from sports: As opponents connect, the core must activate to maintain level ground. If these muscles are weak, the opponent will have the advantage to push and rotate the opposing team member to gain access to the ball. If you’ve ever seen a scrum where two teams maintain stability but rotate the scrum in a uniform and (counter) clockwise fashion around the ball, it means both teams are strong in stabilising their position.
The three categories of core training
Stabilisation
This describes static stability, where you put your body in a position in which you must stabilise your spine and pelvis for a designated amount of time. These are your planks, side planks, single arm plank, single leg planks, planks on swiss balls etc
Most of these exercises require your deepest core muscles to generate low levels of force for increasing amounts of time. You’re focusing primarily on slow-twitch muscle fibers, developing endurance.
Dynamic Stabilisation
This describes moving one or more limbs all while holding the core in a neutral stable position. These exercises tend to focus a little more on some of the faster twitch muscle fibers. These are your mountain climbers, shoulder taps, ab wheel roll outs, pallof presses.
Integrated Stabilisation
These are essentially your everyday functional movements. When looking at these exercises that don’t look like abdominal/core exercises but they are. These include squats, lunges, bends, pushes, pulls and twists, your everyday movements.
You can take this up a notch. The most effective size and strength building exercises work your muscles within a single plane of motion. The more straightforward the exercise, the easier it is to work with heavy weights. But that isn’t necessarily the goal of integrated stabilisation. You want your core muscles to learn to hold your spine in its neutral alignment under conditions that most closely resemble what you’ll encounter in everyday life.
Take holding a small baby (something I know lots about 😉 For most part you don’t hold your baby directly straight onto your body. One arm and one side of your body tends to favour the work. This asymmetrical loading is also found in gardening, carrying the shopping and a host of other stuff we do day to day.
Side note – Holding a baby on your hips hoaking them out to the side is NOT integrated stabilisation. It’s just a lazy compensation
Doing this is asking for back pain
3 awesome abdominal exercises
The key with abdominal training is getting the right progressions. If you struggle to get the basics right then going into advanced abdominal training is just a bad idea.
1 – The Dead bug
This is an anti-extension exercise, requiring dynamic stabilisation. The reason the Dead bug makes the list is because it is a relatively easy exercise to do but with huge benefits particularly to those in anterior pelvic tilt. The key with the dead bug is that your back is completely flat to the ground forcing a mild posterior tilt. While maintaining a stable core position you will move your arms and legs
2 – Heavy Suitcase Carry
This is an anti-lateral flexion exercise that is part of integrated stabilisation. Pick up a heavy dumbbell, kettlebell or even harder, barbell with one hand and walk with it. Naturally the weight will want to pull you down to the side but the strength and stabilisation of your abs prevent it from doing so. The heavier the weight the harder your abs have to work.
3 – The Turkish Get Up
This is one of my favourite exercises. What is a Turkish Get Up you say? To put it in layman’s terms, the Turkish Get Up, or TGU, is a series of basic movement patterns which a person moves through while stabilising a weight overhead with a vertical arm.
The movement patterns mimic those movements that we do every day so the benefits we can get from the exercise can have a direct impact on our day to day lives. Repeated performance of the exercise over time will help to develop and maintain hip mobility, thoracic spinal mobility, scapular stability, lumbar spinal stability, glute strength as well as enhanced proprioception and motor control. To put it simply, you get a lot of bang for your buck!
Exercises like the plank and side plank are fantastic but there functional carryover is mildly limited. How often (apart from the gym) do you find yourself in a plank position? Rarely ever. The TGU is different, we tend to use the patterns found within it in daily life
To Conclude
The purpose of training your abs/core is not to get yourself a six-pack but to stabilise your mid-section building a strong foundation. The stronger the foundation the faster you can run, the higher you can jump, the harder you can punch. The strength in your core literally transfers into your limbs.
That’s it for this newsletter. Yes it did go on a little longer than I was hoping but to be honest I really only skimmed the surface when it comes to abdominal training. Breathing, bracing, intra-abdominal pressure also play huge roles within building a strong core. Maybe I will talk more about that in an up and coming newsletter
Stay healthy
Paul ‘’ abs of steel’’ & Krystie ‘’I think what Paul means is flabs of steel, the only washboard you have is found in the laundry’’
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