Dr. Andy Galpin

Its primary function is to pull the belly inward.

And so when you've ever seen people like yoga practitioners or jujitsu fighters who can pull their stomach way in and do the waves and control like that, that is extreme control of the transverse abdominus.

That's not the oblique muscles.

So we want the ability to stabilize our rib cage with our rectus abdominis.

We want to be able to rotate with our obliques, and we want to be able to pull the rib cage in with our transverse abdominis.

Anybody with a lot of knowledge of anatomy will actually tell you, again, none of these are individual muscles.

They've got dozens.

I think the transverse abdominis has like 28 individual muscles within it.

So these are just big groups, like we kind of refer to your biceps.

Your biceps is not one muscle, it's biceps.

People forget the S on the end because there's multiple, but you get the rough point here.

Now, some people like to train and approach the core based on muscle groups.

Others do it by movement patterns.

So those collective three groups of muscles can make movement happen in several different ways.

And the first is what I've already mentioned.

That is flexion.

This is the setup.

This is your body coming closer together.

flexing forward.

Then there's also lateral flexion.