Dr. Andy Galpin

Some did it differently.

But Arnold was one of, if not the most famous person in the field ever.

And so that really carried it in the mainstream.

You roll into the 1980s and you have now the explosion of Pilates and Jane Fonda and literally the eight minute ab workouts.

And these are all focused on burn, burn, burn, burn, burn.

Right.

Get your abs burning.

And the assumption is the more they burn, the stronger they get.

And while that's reasonably OK to think, it's not as precise and specific as it can be.

You had then the evolution in the 1990s and early 2000s with people like John and McGill who started taking the abs more from the perspective of low back pain.

and started saying, hey, your core is important to your pain, and so we should actually train it with the specific goal of minimizing low back injury or pain.

People hadn't really done ab training for this purpose before that.

We didn't really have discussions in the 70s, 80s, 90s about why your back hurts, why your hips hurt, it's because your core is weak.

And so when we started to unravel this stuff scientifically and from the field, people had to start saying, okay, well, you may be trained like this if you want your abs to look great, but maybe you train like that if you just want your back to not hurt as much.

And this represents the first bifurcation of this training approach.

And so when you hear fitness professionals, physical therapists, maybe differing from your strength coaches in terms of how to train your abs, it probably goes all the way back to this initial changing point where

What we're really talking about is what is our outcome goal?

On one hand, you've got people who are focused exclusively on making your abs look a certain way, and the others are coming at it from a functionality perspective.

Now, I'm not here to tell you which one is more important.

I am here to tell you though, the perspective in which they're educating you will determine in large part what they say works better or worse.