Dr. Andy Galpin

It's right back to what I talked about at the beginning.

If I were to say, do you want to train your quads for growth?

Do you want to train your quads because of knee pain or hip pain, or do you want to train them because you want to jump higher?

you would assume that the training principles differ, right?

So when we start to break down the physiology and the characteristics of the individual core muscles themselves, we start to realize that's not a good rationale to train them in this weird way where we do, again, hundreds of repetitions per day.

We do them every day.

We think that they respond differently.

They are skeletal muscle.

They're not a different type of muscle.

They're not a different fiber type.

They have a slightly different function, but they're not these all-day activated,

So because of that, they have to be trained differently or they recover faster or anything else like that.

There are some unique considerations that do matter to training though.

And specifically what I'm referring to here is the spinal health type of stuff.

So unlike your quad, where I can load it really heavy and I can really isolate it and smash it and not be too worried about any other tissue getting hurt,

We don't have the same freedom with our core.

So I can't have you do, for example, five sets of one repetition at your one rep core max.

I mean, I could probably, but my likelihood of causing an injury or exacerbating an injury in our back or hips is really, really high.

So it's not in the fibers or the muscle itself.

It's what's associated with that tissue, what's around it.