REAL CORE TRAINING

By Abdurahmaan Saloojee

Abdurahmaan is a Pre-Script coach from Ottawa who loves reading, traveling, and training.

REAL CORE TRAINING.

Have you ever seen videos of people doing endless rope crunches while promising “core” gains? What about fancy X crunches, hanging twists, and other painful looking contortions? If you’ve spent any time on the internet, you probably have. You may have even tried some of them yourself (guilty). What do they really do, and how helpful are they?

The exercises mentioned above can be classified as “abdominal training”. They are not necessarily core exercises. To clarify this, we need to understand the difference between muscle action and muscle function. Muscle action is the way a muscle moves from origin to insertion—very simple. The bicep’s action would be bending (flexing) the elbow. However, function is not as easy. A muscle’s function is how it behaves when we walk and breathe. It can also include how we stabilize ourselves as we move through space. Back to the abs: doing fancy X crunches, hanging twists, and other ab exercises are exactly that: ab exercises, not core exercises. They follow the action of the abdominal muscles (rectus abdominis, transverse abdominis, external obliques, and internal obliques but more specifically just the rectus abdominis and external obliques) by flexing the torso  and rotating the torso. However, the action of the core isn’t extremely important: how often in our daily lives do we go about crunching our abs really fast? (If you do, you probably have bigger problems than core exercise selection).

The entirety of the core musculature extends beyond the transverse abdominis, rectus abdominis, external obliques, and internal obliques. The core proper includes the deep spinal muscles on the back of the torso as well. It’s essentially a band of muscles that wraps around the torso. Most of these muscles have specific actions like the abdominal muscles, but again, we return to the discussion of function: with regards to the core, it’s far more important. 

It is important to note that in no way is abdominal training useless. It has a place in training general populations, and definitely has a utility with stage and figure competitors. Someone may be new to the gym or extremely overweight, and it may very well be that there needs to be time devoted specifically to abdominal training to create a base level of strength and musculature. This, while coupled with a focus on reducing body weight, can lead to a better position to start training the core’s function.

Core function is composed of the following: anti rotation, anti flexion, anti lateral flexion, and anti extension. The “anti” denotes resisting force; stabilizing, in other words. Some external stimulus is pushing or pulling our body one way (from someone physically shoving us to a dumbbell being held in one hand), and our core is forced to react to keep us upright. This is the key difference between core and ab training: ab training is conscious and voluntary. Core training is reactive. The basic permutations of core training can be found in Stuart McGill’s Big 3: the modified curl up, bird dog, and side plank. However, these examples are very rudimentary and often not efficient at eliciting a sufficient stimulus in very athletic or strong individuals. Pre-Script’s Level 1 course goes in depth on core training and shows how to create a gradient scale of core progressions that will find exercises that are applicable to the client you are working with.