Dr. Andy Galpin

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?

You're looking at rest intervals of anything you want.

There's excellent research.

Muscle growth is equal whether you use short rest intervals, say 30 seconds between sets, or you use long rest intervals, up to three plus minutes between sets.

So you can do either approach there.

In terms of a frequency, this is going to throw a lot of people off.

You don't necessarily have to, and you probably don't want to train your core if you're trying to maximize its growth more than two to four times per week per muscle group.

I just don't think we have any evidence, and the evidence we do have would suggest you probably don't want to train these muscles every single day.

It doesn't work best for any other muscle.

It probably doesn't work best for our ab muscles either.

I should have also mentioned this a second ago.

But while body fat will of course make your abs more visible, making them larger will as well.

So we don't want to just ignore our abs.

If you want a better looking stomach, you should consider training to get bigger ab muscles.

But you do wanna have maybe some special considerations.

Because the rectus abdominis is prominent,

it is reasonable to say you want to put as much, if not more emphasis on that muscle group than somebody in the perform or feel category.

So that's a unique difference here.