The Motor Unit

Your core muscles aren’t just your abs. Yup, that’s right, they aren’t.

They’re just part of it. In fact, the paper cited¹ in the reference section defines core as “the axial skeleton and all soft tissues with a proximal attachment originating on the axial skeleton, regardless of whether the soft tissue terminates on the axial or appendicular skeleton”. The axial skeleton is the spine, ribcage, and skull, so by the definition above the muscles originating from the spine, head, and ribcage form the core muscles.

This means that your abdominal muscles are just a part of the core and to train your core, focusing on your abdominal muscles alone isn’t going to be enough.

Fortunately, when you implement a decent training program you’re already covering the abdominals, the chest, the upper, and the mid-back muscles. This leaves out a few functions of the core muscles that are left out from training - the lateral flexion strength (think about side bends and side planks) and the rotational strength (think about rotational med ball throws and landmine rotations or any exercise that involves rotating your hips).

Training the abdominals directly through planks, crunches, sit-ups, or leg raises means you’re targeting to improve the spinal flexion aspect around your core. We end up typically overdoing this and forget about the lateral flexion and rotational movements mentioned above, leaving a lot out on the table in terms of core development.

Incorporating this is simple and can be done right after your main training session regardless of whether it is a strength session or a cardio session. I like to plan 3 sessions in total over the entire week with one session dedicated to the three core-focused movements - spinal flexion, lateral flexion, and rotation.

Example exercises are already mentioned above and the sets and rep scheme are 3 to 4 sets of 12 to 20 repetitions or for a time of 30 seconds to a minute if the program calls for a plank variation.

There’s going to be a bit more on core training but that’ll be covered in the next article, but for now, I’ll leave you to think about what you’ve read just now.

Until next time!

References:

1. Behm, David & Drinkwater, Eric & Willardson, Jeffrey & Cowley, Patrick. (2010). Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology position stand: The use of instability to train the core in athletic and nonathletic conditioning. Applied physiology, nutrition, and metabolism = Physiologie appliquée, nutrition et métabolisme. 35. 109-12. 10.1139/H09-128.