Hierarchy of Midsection Training

One of the constants in fitness and strength training is that there are always new fads. There’s always some “new” and exciting style of training or implement (most of which are just rehashes of older stuff) that is going to magically transform the fitness industry. Some of these things end up being useful, while others are pure garbage. Most fall somewhere in between.

A few years ago everyone got all excited about training the “core” and “stability
training”. This spawned a ton of products that put athletes on unstable surfaces and
prompted them to do all sorts of exercises that either belonged in a circus or were
watered-down versions of what they already did. Dumbbell curls standing on a BOSU or
stability ball… Really?

The premise behind the idea is that the unstable surface would cause the body to tighten and train the abdominal muscles so as to create ripped abs, lose fat, and make athletes into miracle-producing freaks. In reality it gave little skinny trainers who were afraid of getting under a heavy bar a hard “skill” to teach their clients and impress them. Enter a horde of fat, weak people rolling around on stability balls in gyms across the country.

Despite my general dislike for this gimmick, there are a few elements of training the
midsection that should be paid attention to when working with athletes, particularly
inexperienced athletes and clients. Let’s look at the function of the midsection first,
primarily focusing on the abdominal and oblique areas, although the whole area consists of the abs, obliques, hips, glutes, and spinal erectors. We’ll focus on the “abs”, which are there to do the following:

-Maintain correct posture and stability, keeping the spine in proper alignment.
-Transfer power from the lower body through the upper body, and vice versa.
-Flex the upper body forward.
-Twist the upper body.

Their function is pretty much in that order of importance, too.

When I start working with a new athlete there are certain steps that I need to go through in their development before we start a lot of heavy training. While most of this stuff is integrated into their training (we don’t spend whole sessions doing “core work” or some other waste of time) there is a definite progression.

First, I need to make sure that they have the ability to maintain a strong position through the mid-section and hips. Many people sit so much in their every day life that they have no ability to hold their middle tight. This exposes them to injury if you load the spine and gives them a truly shitty ability to transfer power throughout their body. Why would I want an athlete to squat with a heavy load on their spine when they can’t hold their hips in position with a push-up? That doesn’t make any sense and yet I see it happen all of the time.

In order to develop that strength we start with a variety of quadrupedal movements. My athletes do push-ups, crawl sideways and forwards, perform crab walks, and move towards suspended holds and more advanced drills.

Next, and somewhat concurrently, we work on anti-rotation. One of the big keys to teach athletes is that rotation of the upper body should not occur deep in the lumbar spine like you see it normally done. This is recipe for a lower back injury. Instead rotation should occur more in the thoracic spine and the hips should rotate as well if a larger range of motion is necessary.

In order to train that quality it’s easier to strengthen and teach anti-rotation first. To do this we work with static movements against rotation, such as the Palloff Press, and unbalanced work (with weight). Wait a minute! I thought you said unbalanced work was for pansies! True, I did, and it is.

However, in this case I’m talking about unbalanced loading. You’ll still maintain firm contact with the ground (how depends on the exercise), but you’ll be loading one side of the body more than the other. Some example could be an overhead dumbbell lunge with different weight dumbbells (fairly advanced), or as simple as a suitcase carry, in which you’re simple walking while holding a dumbbell in one hand. The goal is to maintain straight posture as if there was no load. This teaches the body to NOT twist in response to an imbalanced load.

Once athletes have developed appreciable skill in stabilization then more dynamic exercises involving rotation and flexion/extension can be utilized. They’ll also be far more ready to do the big exercises such as squats, deadlifts, overhead presses, and the like. Their ability to transfer power will be far better as well, which will improve their speed, agility, explosiveness, and training effects.