Dr. Andy Galpin

It's being used for lots of different things.

And then there's also this idea floating around that, okay, muscles like your calves, muscles like your abs that are slow twitch, that are postural, that are on all the time.

either need more training and or can recover faster so you can train it more frequently.

This is the idea that you should train your abs every day or your calves every day or most days.

And it's based on the rationale of what I just said, as well as things like, oh, maybe our core muscles are way more slow twitch.

and other muscles are faster.

The reality of it is, and we don't have a lot of data on things like fiber type for our core muscles, but we do have research going back to like the early 1990s on autopsy models.

So this is when we, unfortunately folks come in after they passed and were able to look at that.

And you're going to be pretty surprised to realize that the vast majority of the muscles in your core are pretty much 50-50 fast twitch, slow twitch, which is almost exactly what things like your vastus lateralis and your quad are.

And so let me ask you this.

If I started this conversation off by saying, do you think that you should train your core the exact same way you train your quads?

You'd be like, no way.

And in fact, muscle fiber type wise, they're very, very similar.

And so now we're getting to the second place.

It's like, okay, well, wait a minute.

They're activated a lot, but they're the same fiber type profile.

They have this anticipatory response.

And when you look around the research,

There's actually no literature at all suggesting that the training principles should differ in your abs versus those in your quad.

Okay, we've already thrown a lot of people's thought process out of whack here.