Dr. Andy Galpin

So we want to think about this as an issue of priority.

Most people do their core or ab work at the end of their training session.

I'm fine with that if we understand the point.

Typically, my rule of thumb, do the thing that is your highest priority on that day first.

So if you're there with the primary goal to target your abs for look, feel, or perform, then you might consider doing it first.

But I'm fine with you doing it last if you feel like fatiguing your abs will take away from another equally or more important movement.

So if you're there to work on your abs but you also want to really increase your pull-ups or your squat or your lunge or anything else, you might necessarily not want to fatigue your abs prior to that because that'll actually

lower your ability to either execute that exercise or increase your injury risk of doing it because you're pre-fatigued.

So I want to finish by going back to the beginning.

I asked some kind of silly and bold questions and I promised we'd come back to it and here we are.

If we take into consideration things like what muscles or what exercises activate our core more, let's see how you do in this little quiz.

So we'll go into reverse order.

First, what do we now think about training frequency?

Do we still think that training every day is how we have to train our core or even the best?

Surely not at this point.

I'm okay with you doing that, or in fact, I could argue it is good if the goal is feel, if the goal is activation, if the goal is movement correction.

We need to practice different movement patterns.

But if we're trying to maximize either perform or aesthetics, we probably actually want to hedge more towards two to three or four days a week rather than seven.

So in reality, it was kind of a trick question because it's correct to do them both ways, but it's not correct to do them the wrong way when we have different goals.

Another thing I brought up were things like machines.