Working on that six pack is a very popular goal. Every fitness magazine out there has a new routine on the cover of each issue. What is always lacking is a better understanding of what the core is actually supposed to be doing and how it contributes to strength.
Let’s start by quickly mentioning what your core training should not emphasize. Bending or twisting your body as in crunches, side crunches, or oblique twists is not where you should be spending your time for meaningful changes to your health and strength. Your abdominal muscles do fascilitate those movements, but that is not the most important role that they play. Their most important purpose is to resist these movements in order to stabilize the trunk, brace the spine, and resist compression. These actions allow you to produce force without injuring your body by creating a stable base for your muscles to work off of.
The phrase that you will most often hear to illustrate the point is, “you can’t fire a cannon from a canoe.” I also once attended a seminar with Michol Dalcourt in which he demonstrated that the body will not produce a force that it cannot stabilize. In other words, if you can’t brace your body, particularly the core, then you will never produce a great amount of force and are therefore limiting your strength.
One simple example is the overhead press. If you watch overhead pressing in the gym, you will certainly see someone who, when pressing a heavy weight, arches their back to get the weight up. The arching of the back could be a cheat to get around poor shoulder mobility, but often it is a cheat to recruit bigger muscles like the pecs (in this case the overhead press ends up more like an incline chest press). Whatever the reason, the lower back becomes unstable. The arching bends the low back and allows the weight to drift behind your center of gravity, creating a lever which puts torque on the lower spine. Needless to say, it is not in your body’s interest to allow you to put too much load up into the top position because it creates a force that cannot be stabilized. It is not your brain’s goal to allow your body to be broken in half.
In contrast, your spine is very stable vertically. The intervertebral discs are extremely resilient under evenly distributed pressure. Also, the surrounding core musculature provides excellent resistence to the compression. Thus, standing tall and preventing arching allows your body to be in the most stable position it can be. Now your brain will not have to limit the press to prevent injury and you will find that you can produce much more force. This is true strength and this is what you should be aiming for. Unless you are body building, what is the point of having huge muscles on a weak structure which cannot support the force they can produce?
Exercises that help to work on this stabilizing function include:
– planks
– farmers walks
– renegade rows
– fall outs
– squats
– deadlift
– overhead press
Notice that even an overhead press could be considered a core workout because a proper overhead press requires lots of core stabiliity.
Anecdotally I have noticed that my strength has improved significantly in all exercises after a cycle of training that emphasizes the core. I can feel my body’s ability to be more stable and how having that base of support allows me to generate more force. Give it a try, and if you are uncertain of where you are have a personal trainer evaluate your core strength!
