Dr. Andy Galpin

So this is causing you to pull your abdominals in while you're making movement and you're avoiding unnecessary and unwanted movement.

Those are more effective.

I'm sorry to say this for the third or fourth time now, but it's a really important point.

It's the forward and backward stuff that tends to be best for your rectus abdominis, not the rotation.

So just think about it that way.

So if you're programming for the muscle, that's really as far and as complicated as you have to go.

With that basic information, I want to go directly into specific considerations for looking versus feeling versus performing.

And let's start off, of course, with our look.

So if your primary here, because you want your abs to look better,

I have to say something we have not yet acknowledged, and that is the fact that the vast majority of aesthetic appearance in your core is simply a body fat, body composition story, which is a nice way of saying, you know, your abs are made in the kitchen, not the gym.

100% true.

Maybe we'll come back on another episode or listen to one of our prior episodes on fat loss to talk about that, but I really want to stay focused today on just the training aspect of it.

So yes, the best way to have more defined, more visible abs is to have very little fat.

particularly around your core.

But that said, what are the training implications if either you've got the nutrition down or you don't care about it quite yet or whatever the case is?

I said this earlier, but there's actually very little research on which types of exercises or training protocols are best for muscle growth of the core.

We've got a lot of that for your arms and legs and everywhere else, but we just don't have it for your core muscles most.

So that said, this is when we have to default to basic training strategies.

I went through that time before to set up the fact that physiologically, it's very, very similar to your other muscles so that we have no rationale to think that for muscle growth, our training protocols differ for our core.

What's that mean?