Dr. Andy Galpin

If you were to take a five pound dumbbell and do a five pound lateral side bend, and you compared that to a one repetition max leg press,

I don't think that study's ever been done, but I'd be willing to bet your obliques, your rectus abdominis, and your transverse abdominis are contracting far harder on that leg press than they are that side bend.

If we're equating for load and other variables, sure, when you have to stabilize your body versus when a machine could do it for you, you should get more activation from the free weights.

But just because it's a free weight and just because it's a machine, it does not guarantee that fact.

Execution matters here more than exercise choice.

I also brought up things like a bench press or a deadlift versus a sit-up.

Where we have to remember here is while a sit-up in this example might be more specific to the muscle in the core Because I can't load it very heavy safely for most people I'm gonna be limited in force demand that limitation in force demand is very similar to what we just got done talking about and so in this case I

a bigger, more dynamic exercise might in fact be more effective for strengthening or even growing your core muscles.

And the last one I'll give you here, which is something we didn't get into too much, and I'll leave as a teaser, and that's the entire topic of weight belts.

You'll hear controversy on this, but to me, I think the science has been settled here for over a decade.

If you take a weight belt,

and you put it on really tight, you cinch it all the way down, you might see a regression or a drop in muscle activation during any given exercise.

But if you put the weight belt on just barely, kind of snug, you can actually see increased core activation because it gives you tactile feedback.

As the example I gave you earlier, when I said put your hand on your side or put it on your back or get in this different position because it causes you some tactile feedback and oftentimes people have a better ability to contract when they have that feedback.

The same is true of a belt.

The evidence as it currently stands in my personal approach is to think about belts like this.

If I need to use it as a way to cue or to learn an activation strategy, then I'll put it on there.

But then ideally we progress to the next step where we can remove it and we have conscious control of that musculature or that movement pattern independent of an external stimuli.

If we're going to be loading really, really heavy, maybe 85% or more of our 100 max on a bench or a pull-up or an overhead press or some big movement,

and someone feels more secure and more stable and they want to add a belt, then I'm absolutely okay with that because we're no longer using that movement to train the core.