Dr. Andy Galpin

So if you were to take your hands and point them down to the ground, so your fingers are pointing to the ground and you put them right on your sides so that your palm is on the bottom of your ribs and your fingertips are touching the top of your hips.

Those are your internal and external obliques.

They are the side muscles.

They are also important for the aesthetics crowd, because that's what gives you that V shape or that taper or helps kind of wrap the abs around themselves to look a particular way.

The transverse abdominis or the TVA is the thing that helps us rotate from side to side.

It is our rotational movement.

Now this right here causes controversy.

And I actually shouldn't say controversy, but misunderstanding.

Because the obliques are on the side, and if you do any rotational movement, you will know exactly what I'm talking about.

You'll be, ah, like sore on the sides.

The mistake here is the next muscle group, right?

That transverse abdominis.

The transverse abdominis is not the muscle or groups of muscles that rotate you in the transverse plane.

You see what happened there?

You'd think the transverse muscle is what makes you transverse, rotate side to side, but it's not, it's the obliques.

And so because of that, people do not train the transverse appropriately because they're actually confusing what it does.

The transverse abdominus is like a giant weight belt around your entire core.

It goes from the bottom of your ribs, from the front to the back, all the way down to the bottom of your hip, from the front to the back.

It's like a giant corset.

It's a huge thing that goes down, connects the entire thing together.