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115: How to Get Abs
636 Plays15 hours ago
In this episode of the Movement Logic Podcast, Laurel Beversdorf and Dr. Sarah Court examine the enduring myths and misinformation around the aesthetic goal of “getting abs.” They analyze the anatomy and function of the abdominal muscles, the cultural evolution of ab training versus core strength and stability training, and the role mechanical tension, muscle length, and training volume play in hypertrophy (muscle growth). Additionally, they discuss how pursuing the aesthetic goal of "getting abs" is different from performance goals related to abdominal strength.
The hosts unpack popular misconceptions, such as “abs are made in the kitchen,” or that body composition changes work differently for women than men, or that core stability means never moving your spine. They contrast these myths with what current research on energy balance and hypertrophy training show. They also trace how Pilates, physical therapy, and social media helped shape the modern core strength and stability narrative—one that, in some circles, shifted from building strength through movement to “protecting” the lumbar spine by avoiding it.
Additionally, this episode aims to clarify all of the factors that influence the appearance of the abdominal region, and how gendered, moralized, and shame-based messaging about the midsection continues to distort public understanding of exercise and body image.
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RESOURCES
Clip: Mel Robbing Podcast interview with Stacy Sims about abs
67: Popular Explanations for SI Joint Pain are Wrong, Says Science
78: Behemoth Knee Myths
20: Pelvic Floor In-Depth with Stephanie Prendergast, MPT
54: Alignment Dogma - Spine
58: Alignment Dogma - Shoulders
48: Alignment Dogma - Pelvis
80: Posture Panic Pt. 3 with Author Dr. Beth Linker, PhD
50: Bracing versus Breathing
Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America, by Beth Linker
Hodges, 2001; PMID: 11181617
Kalantari, 2024; PMID: 38565979
Brown, 2011; PMID: 21325932
Cholewicki, 1999; PMID: 10521659
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Transcript
Introduction and Philosophy
00:00:00
Speaker
I'm Laurel Biebersdorf, strength and conditioning coach. And I'm Dr. Sarah Court, physical therapist. With over 30 years of combined experience in fitness, movement, and physical therapy, we believe in strong opinions loosely held. Which means we're not here to hype outdated movement concepts.
00:00:15
Speaker
or to gatekeep or fearmonger strength training for women. For too long, women have been sidelined in strength training. Oh, you mean handed pink dumbbells and told to sculpt? Whatever that means, we're here to change that with tools, evidence, and ideas that center women's needs and voices.
00:00:32
Speaker
Let's dive in.
Podcast Announcement and Course Availability
00:00:46
Speaker
Welcome to the Movement Logic Podcast. My name is Laurel Beaversdorf and I'm here with my co-host, Dr. Sarah Court. Today is Wednesday. CART closes on Lyft for Longevity this Saturday night at midnight.
00:01:00
Speaker
So that means you have four days? Four many sleeps? My daughter always wants to know. How many sleeps? One, two, three. It's only three sleeps. Three sleeps until CART closes. Yeah. Yeah. So if you have been on the fence...
00:01:14
Speaker
please jump off of it, land on your two feet, experience some impact, go to the show notes, click the link and get on it. ah get on it We can't promise we're running this in the next six months.
00:01:26
Speaker
It might be in the next year. We don't know when this is happening again. You might want to join us now. Yeah.
Overcoming Hesitation to Join
00:01:31
Speaker
I had an email from somebody who was saying, I've been listening to your podcast and paying attention to what you've been doing for a few years. And I'm really interested in the Lift for Longevity course, but I'm just feeling too shy. And one of these times I'll join. And I wrote back and I was like, there is going to be no better time to join it than right now.
00:01:47
Speaker
Yeah. And that's true, whether you're feeling shy or not, you're never going to be younger. There's never going to be a better time as far as the stuff going on in your life. You're not going to be less stressed a year from now. You know what i mean? Like, yeah.
00:01:59
Speaker
Like when people say there's never the perfect time to get pregnant, there's never going to be the perfect time to start changing your life. So you might as well start changing your life right now. Yeah.
Course Frequency and Future Plans
00:02:08
Speaker
So yeah, my feeling is just, you can put it off, you can postpone it. But when Laurel says, we don't know when we're doing it again, it's actually very true.
00:02:15
Speaker
We've been doing it twice a year, but we're probably not doing that next year. So you want to get on this. We've got another thing in the works that is much smaller, shorter DIY. So we're probably going to be devoting our time and energy to that in the early part of next year. and so you're going to have to wait possibly a full year yeah to do this with us.
00:02:33
Speaker
And we have just solidified this now. So if you're like, oh, shit, I didn't know that. It's always been every six months. Not now. Not necessarily.
Misconceptions About Abs
00:02:42
Speaker
all Alrighty, so today is a type of episode we just haven't done in a while. We haven't done it all season.
00:02:49
Speaker
It's an episode about an area of the body. And we have done a few like this in past seasons. Sometimes we look at an area as it relates to injury like the sacroiliac joint or the knees, or often we're looking at an area as it relates to myths and misinformation about it, like the pelvic floor, pelvis, the spine, the shoulders. We'll link these episodes in the show notes for you. Today, we're covering an area of the body that fits our female physiology theme.
00:03:14
Speaker
It's an area of the body that women are told they need a lot of things to fix. Supplements, special ways of exercising, special ways of doing cardio, special macronutrient intake timing strategies, better posture, Spanx, or good old-fashioned, sucking it in.
00:03:30
Speaker
Today's episode is about the belly region. More specifically, it's about how to get abs and what that even means, whether it's possible, and of course, some reflection on why we're told we need to get abs to begin with.
00:03:44
Speaker
Let's start with the word abs, which comes from abdomen, which is technically cavity, a space that holds your guts. But when people say they want abs, they're not after a better cavity. They're after the muscles around it, the ones that wall in the cavity, move it, support it.
00:04:01
Speaker
And when they say they want abs, it's not that they were the unlucky ones born without these muscles. It's that they want those muscles, the abs, to be more visible, aka more aesthetically appealing according to society's standards.
00:04:17
Speaker
So from our understanding, quote, I want abs is an aesthetic goal more than anything else. There's lots of different types of goals. There's performance goals. I want to be able to do this physical feat by this time, or there's lifestyle goals. I just want to exercise regularly. There's health related goals. I want to be healthier. i want to lower my blood pressure, whatever that goal might be. This is an aesthetic goal. I want my body to look a certain way. And believe
Critique of Mel Robbins' Podcast on Diet and Exercise
00:04:44
Speaker
it or not, when it comes to this aesthetic goal of getting abs, there is a shitload, a fuckton of misinformation around how to achieve it, to get abs.
00:04:54
Speaker
Just fire up the internet and you're just pelted with an onslaught of misinformation around how to get abs. Here are a few of the wackiest we've come across. Use this special cream or oil, rub it on your stomach, burn your belly fat.
00:05:10
Speaker
yeah Drink this detox tea or do this cleanse. It'll flatten your stomach. Wear this ab belt or use this vibration device. It will tone your abs while you watch soap operas.
00:05:23
Speaker
Take turmeric supplements to reduce stubborn belly fat. That one I think is from Mary Claire Haver. I think she since took that post down, but it existed. All right. Yeah.
00:05:34
Speaker
So the impetus for this episode was in one of our previous episodes when we look into the work of Stacey Sims. So while we were listening to the Mel Robbins podcast interview of Dr. Stacey Sims, there was an exchange between Mel and Sims about abs, how to get them, why women supposedly can't get them the same way men get them, and what Sims said women should do instead. And It sounds credible, but when you take the narrative apart, it really makes no sense at all. So it starts with Robbins saying that her husband always reminds her that, quote, abs are built in the kitchen, not in the gym. And then Mel Robbins asks Sims if that's a man thing. And Sims immediately agrees. She goes, that works for men. Definitely.
00:06:19
Speaker
So then from there, Sims explains that when men cut out things like alcohol or sugar, their belly fat supposedly just melts away. But for women, she says, it doesn't work that way because women hold on to calories thanks to the hypothalamus, which is the part of the brain that regulates hunger and energy balance. And according to Sims, when women reduce food intake without replacing calories elsewhere, their hypothalamus panics, basically, lowering energy expenditure and making fat loss nearly impossible.
00:06:51
Speaker
Okay. And then she shifts to exercise advice, like how you would get abs. And she says women shouldn't bother with sit-ups or other abdominal isolation exercises because compound movements like squats and deadlifts build the abs in a more functional way.
00:07:07
Speaker
Because women's center of gravity is down in their hips, whereas men's is up in their chest. This is where it really starts to make my brain feel like it's leaking out of my ears. What the heck does that have to do with anything? But anyway, and apparently if women get stronger through these compound lifts, they're going to stand taller.
00:07:29
Speaker
And then once they do that, they're... abs will ah oh Oh, it's wild. So there's a lot going on here. Yeah, we're gonna link the interview. And I think I can even link the timestamp in which this exchange happens on the Mel Robbins interview in the show notes. And then we'll also link our episode.
00:07:48
Speaker
Make Stacey Sims make sense. Okay, so here's the gist of the claims that are made in the episode. Number one, abs are made in the kitchen. This implies that diet affects whether or not you have abs more so than exercise or genetics or a host of other things.
00:08:05
Speaker
What works for men, so claim number two, what works for men doesn't work for women. Women apparently follow different fat loss rules than men, different hypertrophy rules than men. Number three, women hold on to calories because of their hypothalamus, which is, yeah confusing mix up between fasting and low energy availability, which we discuss and make stasis as soon as makes sense.
00:08:24
Speaker
Women should do
Debunking Myths About Fat Loss and Abs
00:08:25
Speaker
compound lifts, not sit-ups to get abs because differences in center of mass. That's the hardest one. That's the one where i'm like, what?
00:08:35
Speaker
So a compound lift listeners is when two or more major joints and large masses and muscles that surround those joints are involved in a movement. So yeah, squats and deadlifts. And then flame number five, standing taller makes your abs show, suggesting that posture is what we need to fix it to change body composition. That's right.
00:08:53
Speaker
That's right. So Sarah and I are going to rapid fire respond to these claims. And then we're going to talk about what the research for a long time has actually shown about how to get abs if that's your goal, right? So Sarah, are abs made in the kitchen?
00:09:06
Speaker
In other words, is diet and not training what determines visible abs? What we do know, and this is a lot with the work of Herman Ponser and his lab, is that your body composition overall, the amount of fat mass versus lean mass on your body is generally determined by your diet, right?
00:09:28
Speaker
If you're eating more calories than you need, your body will turn that into that storage on your body. If you're eating fewer calories than you need for your like basic daily metabolic output, you will lose weight. And that's basically just true across the board for everybody, men and women, whether you're pre or post-menopausal, it's consistently true. Now your body composition can change. And especially during the menopause transition, a lot of women find, I have found that I have slightly more mass around the middle of my body now, not because anything necessarily changed, but this is just related to the hormonal changes that you go through during menopause and how your body kind of shifts where it holds weight. Fine. As far as like having visible abs, they may or may not show up as much as you quote unquote think or want them to.
00:10:15
Speaker
And it doesn't mean that you are exercising wrong or your diet determines what your body looks like
Exercise Ineffectiveness for Fat Loss
00:10:21
Speaker
for a large part, but so do genetics. And yeah some of it's going to be like just where your body naturally wants to hold weight. And I learned from Ponzer's book, Burn, which we'll link in the show notes, that exercise is a poor tool for fat loss. Yes.
00:10:38
Speaker
And that was very eye-opening to me because this is something that I thought was true. And I think a lot of people still believe is true. And it's really easy to believe this is true because it's plausible it's very plausible that this type of exercise will cause you to lose fat or this type of cardio is great for fat loss or You know, Pilates or bar is great for phallus. Yeah, it makes sense because you're burning calories and therefore that's going to potentially put you in a calorie deficit. But what happens is that we often make up for the energy expenditure by eating more.
00:11:07
Speaker
Yeah. You don't even realize we're doing it. It's very subconscious. Totally. hard to track. It's hard to know unless you're measuring everything. And even then measurements can be off, but it's very sneaky the way your body will recoup the energy. Yeah.
00:11:21
Speaker
Because that's its job basically it is to prevent you from starving. Yeah. And so your body has this sort of like ability to adjust the amount of calories you're using for your day based on the amount of exercise that you did. So it'll ramp it up and down. Yeah. Yeah. The bottom
Scientific Clarification on Abs and Hypothalamus
00:11:37
Speaker
line is exercise is good for you and you should do it. And it's going to help maintain the weight that you are currently at, but it's not a great weight loss tool by itself. Like you couldn't just exercise more, not change anything about how you're eating and start losing weight.
00:11:50
Speaker
Probably not. Probably not because your body would naturally change how you're eating it would change how much you're eating. Unless you're like really measuring everything and have this calorie target and stuff I don't really know too much about, but I'm learning more about just from following people online and yeah evidence-based sources. We're going to have an interview with one. That's right.
00:12:08
Speaker
Very excited. if We're going to be interviewing a dietician very soon. Yes. Do women need to follow different fat loss rules than men? No, they don't. Again, this is about energy balance. Energy balance works the same way for men and women. There are sex differences.
00:12:21
Speaker
Don't get me wrong. For example, women have a higher percentage of body fat and they have more of what's called essential fat. And then depending on where they carry it, it might be harder for women to lose fat in the abdominal region than men. But the same rules around energy balance apply. In other words, the same rules for getting into a calorie deficit apply to women and men.
00:12:40
Speaker
Sarah mentioned that women start to store fat more so in the abdominal area during the menopause transition. So that also, like I said, it might make it harder for specifically women, but women around that menopause transition to lose fat in the belly area.
00:12:53
Speaker
But the way, this is the takeaway, the way fat loss occurs for both men and women is still via that calorie deficit. yeah Sarah, do women hold onto belly fat because of their hypothalamus?
00:13:05
Speaker
ah I don't think so.
Effective Exercises for Ab Hypertrophy
00:13:07
Speaker
ah This kind of like the whole thing with the hypothalamus and Stacey Sims, and you should definitely go listen to our episode, is she actually does seem to mix up things like intermittent fasting, which is when you just are still getting enough energy. You're still getting enough calories, but you're limiting the hours.
00:13:24
Speaker
in which you take them in. P.S. That doesn't do anything for you unless you're also lowering the number of calories that you're taking in. it doesn't matter when during the day you do it, if it's still the same amount or more. She's confusing this idea with actual low energy availability, which is when you have a chronic condition, like something like an anorexia. And if you're consistently taking in way too few calories. If you under fuel as a runner, that's very common in endurance sports where the smaller your body size, literally the higher your relative VO2 max gets, but then you're obviously not fueling for your sport. You're at risk for lots of different injuries, yeah burnout, stuff like that. Yeah.
00:14:03
Speaker
so sims conflates those two things so i think it's hard to say that the hypothalamus is why women hold on to belly fat i don't think we can draw a straight line between the two but it's still the rules still apply it doesn't change the approach if you want to lose fat mass you still have to be in a calorie deficit it doesn't matter what your hypothalamus is up to laurel our compound lifts like squats better for getting abs for women no they're not it's so random it's the randomest thing like It's like kind's actually kind of a common belief that so if you just do squats, you've got your abs, like the ab, the direct ab training is unnecessary because you do heavy squats.
00:14:39
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. oh Yeah. This is a thing. So compound lifts involve the abs because you're probably bracing, especially if the loads are heavy, you're using your abs to stabilize your spine during a back squat, during a deadlift. There's also going to be better force transfer from the ground to lift the load when you keep a stiffer trunk, but Compone lifts are not a direct way or a superior way or even a very good way to drain the abs.
00:15:04
Speaker
If your purpose for doing the exercise is to hypertrophy your abs, it's not a good way to do it. They're far inferior to direct ways of training slash growing abs.
00:15:15
Speaker
the abs, because again, the goal is aesthetic. It's that I want abs, I want my abs to be visible. One of the ways that we can work toward achieving that is to make our abs actually bigger. So they stick through the skin more like they pop out more poo poo poo.
00:15:30
Speaker
But you know, The squat, the deadlift, they don't involve loading the abdominal muscles from a long muscle length. We're going to talk about this. We'll talk about why that's beneficial for hypertrophy. Basically, here's the thing. The abs are not agonists or prime movers of the squat. Your quads, your glutes, those are, your adductors even, those are, but the abdominal muscles are involved as stabilizers. So that makes it so that those exercises aren't great for ab training.
00:15:59
Speaker
if your goal is hypertrophy. So a good question to ask is when it comes to which exercise is best to hypertrophy a particular muscle group, ask yourself, does the exercise directly train that muscle group? Is your ability to do the exercise limited by your strength in that muscle group? When I can't stand up from a squat, it's not because my abs are tired. So what is the first limiter to your ability to do the exercise with the deadlift? Sometimes it's my grip strength. Sometimes it's my hamstrings. Sometimes it's my glutes. Sometimes it's even my back muscles. We'll talk about it, but back muscles are not abs. They're not the abdominal muscles technically. And it's not typically what people are looking to change aesthetically when they talk about getting abs either.
00:16:36
Speaker
So ask yourself, is a muscle group the prime mover of that exercise? Another way to think about that is when I can't do another rep of this exercise, which muscle group is the reason why, right? Yeah. The abs are not the reason why you can't do another squat. Typically not the reason you can't do a most compound lifts, including the bench press, the pull-up, even the pull-up, which I think probably places the most significant amount of like direct load on the abs because it's an anti-extension effort. You've got to contract your anterior abdominals to not extend your spine too much.
00:17:07
Speaker
Even that is is an inferior abdominal exercise because it doesn't work the abs at a long muscle. So anyway, we're
Misconceptions About Posture and Abs
00:17:13
Speaker
going to talk all about this stuff, but No, no, Sarah, compound lifts are not better for getting abs.
00:17:19
Speaker
Okay. Sarah, will standing taller help our abs show better, thus giving us abs? This is also the part where i was like, what? Because the standing taller is supposedly a direct result of the compound lifts, right? And then as a result from that,
00:17:32
Speaker
My abs that I've built during those compound lifts are suddenly on display. The short answer is no, you can stand up as tall as you want. You can like lengthen and try to get as tall as possible. Like when my nephews are trying to convince me that they are as tall as I am, which they almost are 14. Crazy.
00:17:49
Speaker
And they'll like go taller, taller, taller, taller. It doesn't make their abs pop out. yeah Like you don't, if you don't, if there's no visible muscle there, there's no visible muscle there. It doesn't matter what position you stand in.
00:18:00
Speaker
And also like good posture and ripped abs are not the same thing in people's heads or not the same thing in my head, at least. So yeah. Yeah. All right Well, now we've, we've discussed that. We've got that out of the way that we're going get more into the topic of abs because there's a lot of different angles for us to talk about this from, and that's what we're going to do. so
Anatomy and Function of Ab Muscles
00:18:21
Speaker
here are some of the angles. So the first one is the anatomical angle.
00:18:24
Speaker
Where are the abs? What are their relationship to areas or other muscle groups around them? The pelvic floor, low back, your diaphragm and other breathing muscles. And then semantics or how is the area talked about, right? We say abs or sometimes we say core. What does that mean? What does trunk mean? How are these terms used and these different areas talked about and argued about in strength versus yoga versus Pilates, for example? um We have the functional angle, right? What purpose do the abs actually serve? And they have a lot of purposes as a wall, pressure modulator, creator of movement, postural stability, and more. And then we have function versus aesthetics, right?
00:19:00
Speaker
The appearance of abs as an aesthetic versus the functional goal, right? Do we care about how they look, right? That six pack that everyone's trying to get versus how they function, which is the actual strength of the muscles involved.
00:19:14
Speaker
We're going to talk about physiological necessities for abs, right? What physiological and anatomical factors go into that visible appearance of abs. I just want to say, sometimes when I work with clients and we're doing some core work or whatever, if they have some abdominal fat or whatever, a lot of time they'll touch it and they'll be like, I don't have abs.
00:19:31
Speaker
And I'm like, no, you do. They're just, they're you're keeping them warm with a nice, they're under there. They're under there. And then we're going to talk about exercise prescription for abs, right? How to most effectively build our hypertrophy abs for strength and aesthetics and the hangups we have around the exercises that actually do this the most efficiently.
00:19:51
Speaker
Spoiler, it's not your squat and your deadlift. And then also because it's us, a sociocultural lens. What is the meaning of having abs for women over the years? What does this idea represent? How has it changed over time? Different aesthetic ideals. So we're going to get into all of this.
00:20:06
Speaker
Yeah. So let's start with the anatomy, as we mentioned. When we say abs, we're referring to muscles. Okay. So that's first and foremost. These muscles are named after the cavity that they form walls around. So in anatomy, a cavity is a hollow space within the body that houses organs and is enclosed by soft tissue, muscles, bone. The trunk contains two major cavities. It has thoracic cavity. This one houses the heart and lungs, which is the vitalist of vitals. So the ribs are a really big deal and play an important role to protect those organs. Then beneath that, we have the abdominal pelvic cavity, which contains most of the digestive organs, stomach, liver, intestines, parts of the urinary and reproductive systems, the kidneys, bladder, uterus, and ovaries.
00:20:50
Speaker
The abdominal cavity lies below the diaphragm, the respiratory diaphragm, which forms its ceiling. And above the pelvic floor, which forms its floor. And so just a note, again, anatomically, the pelvic floor is the floor of the pelvic cavity, but it's continuous, not the same as, but continuous with the abdominal cavity. And together, they're often referred to as the abdominal pelvic cavity because there's no physical separation between them.
00:21:14
Speaker
The walls of the abdominal cavity are made up of muscles, some of which we colloquially call the abs. The abs consist of four principal muscles. So when we say abs, we're talking about rectus abdominis, external abdominal obliques, internal abdominal obliques, and the transversus abdominis.
00:21:32
Speaker
Muscles enclose the abdominal cavity all the way around, but the abs, the four that we named, specifically enclose it anteriorly and laterally. So from the front and the sides.
00:21:44
Speaker
Posteriorly, from the back, the cavity is enclosed by the lumbodorsal or thoracolumbar fascia. So this is that... thick kind of diamond-shaped, huge white sheet of connective tissue pictured in anatomy books. It spans the entire lower back, anchors the spine, ribs, and pelvis together. This fascia connects major muscles or major muscles connect into or invest into it on the back and the sides, including the obliques, the an internal abdominal obliques, but also the lats, which are a prime mover of shoulder extension. This thoracolumbar fascia acts as an attachment site for...
00:22:18
Speaker
Deeper muscles that run through or within its layers, the erector spinae, the multifidi, and the quadris lumborum are a few. So many of these muscles move and support the abdominal region. In other words, they move the lumbar spine, right? They change the position of the abdominal region, but they aren't abs.
00:22:39
Speaker
They're not the focus, certainly, of this aesthetic goal of having abs. They might play a role in a strong core. core, but we're talking about, just to remind you, we're talking about the aesthetic goal of abs. Okay. So anatomically abdominal muscles, the abs refer to structures forming or acting upon the anterior abdominal wall and the lateral abdominal wall. The term abs is not a formal anatomical category. It's a colloquial shorthand for these anterior lateral wall muscles, the abdominal muscles.
00:23:08
Speaker
So they are formally referred to as abdominal muscles in anatomy textbooks. We call them abs. Let's name them. So the most superficial, most on the surface, the one that everyone gets really worked up about is the rectus abdominis.
00:23:21
Speaker
And it's it's really the most associated with this aesthetic goal for abs, because this is your quote unquote six pack muscle. or We're going to talk about that though. So it runs vertically from the edge of the cartilage of your ribs and the xiphoid process, which is the bottom of your sternum, straight down the middle of the front of your body and attaches all the way to the pelvis, the pubic symphysis and the pubic crest at the front of the pelvis.
00:23:45
Speaker
And it's divided by these bands of connective tissue, there are tendinous intersections, and that separates it into these multiple bellies of muscle. And this kind of segmentation varies and is is genetically determined, right? But these intersections create this look of the quote unquote six pack, although it might actually be an eight pack or a four pack or a two pack or three pack or five pack.
00:24:07
Speaker
We're going to discuss this later. Yeah. Quote unquote, six pack of appearance when the muscle is hypertrophied and not covered by subcutaneous fat. Reminds me of living in new York City, you go to the bodega and you you don't want six beers, you just want three. one yeah So you take some beers out and you put them on the shelf and then you carry the like little carrier with the three beers. And they don't they're like, sure, yeah, I'm just going charge for three beers. And this is also all of the core muscles contribute, but the rectus abdominis contributes to maintaining what's called intra-abdominal pressure for IAP, which is the pressure within that abdominal cavity during breathing and bracing. But we're also going to talk about that later on.
00:24:44
Speaker
yeah Okay, the external obliques and the internal obliques are two more of your abs. Let's start with the external abdominal obliques. So these form the outermost lateral layer of the abdominal wall. Their fibers run from high to low, from high outward to low inward, from the lower ribs toward the midline of your abdomen called the linea alba.
00:25:07
Speaker
It's like a seam of connective tissue right along the midline of your belly. And then the iliac crest, right? They attach the iliac crest, which is the top order of your pelvis. So I can find this direction more easily when I think of the direction my fingers point as I lift my hands up and then start to lower them into the lower coat pockets of my winter coat. So as my fingers come into the coat pocket of my winter coat,
00:25:34
Speaker
They're pointing from high to low, outward to inward. So that's the external abdominal obliques. Now deep or underneath or closer to the inside of the body, we have the internal abdominal obliques.
00:25:48
Speaker
They run almost perpendicular with the fibers of the externals. So the externals run in the finger direction of reaching into your lower coat pockets. The internal obliques run in the finger direction of reaching into the inside upper pocket of your coat where you keep your handkerchief or your reading glasses, your cheaters, as my research professor says. So as you slide your fingers into the interior pocket of your coat from high to low your fingers are going from midline outward, right? So these fibers actually crisscross almost like a basket weave, although the externals are fully superficial and the internal
00:26:27
Speaker
Fibers are fully deep. They don't weave in and out of each other, but it creates this multi-directional kind of crosshatch look of muscle fibers. And so the internal and external obliques, they share a broad fascial attachment to the linea elbow, which is that midline of the abdomen from the front and the thoracolumbar fascia, which is that huge diamond shaped fascia on the back.
00:26:48
Speaker
So they really wrap all the way around your sides and they're overlapping crosshatched appearance or fiber orientation that creates this really strong multilayered sheath that supports, protects, creates force, transmits force.
00:27:03
Speaker
through the abdominal region. And then the deepest layer is called the transversus abdominis. And if you have ever done any Pilates, you have heard about this. So we've got the rectus abdominis that's going top to bottom. We've got the obliques that are doing this cross-hatching on the side of your body. And then we have the transversus, which wraps horizontally around the waist. If you imagine just taking packing tape and wrapping around something over and over and over again, right? And this horizontal fiber alignment is then very useful for cinching in, pulling in, or just stiffening in place, right, as needed if you're going brace.
00:27:42
Speaker
And it can also help modulate that interabdominal pressure that we were talking about. It's broad corset-like fibers are less about moving the spine and more about compressing the abdominal contents to some extent. Did you go to prom in high school? I mean, I went to a British boarding school, so we had that. It wasn't called prom, but yes, we had an end of senior dance thing, whatever.
00:28:02
Speaker
did the Did the guys wear tuxes? What an excellent question. This is long time ago. Probably, probably. I went to a really small high school in rural Wisconsin, and all the guys rented tuxedos and had cummerbunds, which when I was looking up analogies for the transversus abdominis, was like, oh, cummerbunds. And then I was like, oh, my God, that's not even how you say it. It's spelled cummerbund. Cummerbund.
00:28:29
Speaker
summer one And I learned that it originated in 19th century colonial India, where British military officers adopted a wide waist sash worn by Indian men, so they culturally appropriated it. And it was called a kammerbhond. That's exactly where your TA a is.
00:28:45
Speaker
And it's running in the kind of same exact fiber direction. So whenever I think of the TA, always think of kammerbhond. cummerbund. A cummerbund. Yeah. The only difference I would say is the fibers of the transversus abdominis are mostly on the sides.
00:28:56
Speaker
They don't and as much across the actual middle because they invest into the abdominal fascia and the thoracolumbar fascia. But yes, that's exactly where it is. It's at your waist. But the force is circumferential and runs in the direction of the cummerbund. Exactly. Or a corset. A lot of people use corset as a language.
00:29:15
Speaker
So yeah, the transverse adontus, it doesn't actually create spinal movement because it doesn't attach to any of the bony landmarks that would provide leverage for spinal movement. Instead, it's this compression of the cavity. So creating that stiffness, that trunk stiffness or stability sometimes for your lifts. But we're gonna again, we're going to talk about that more later. All right. So let's get into the semantics of this. What are we really talking about when we're talking about abs?
00:29:41
Speaker
When people talk about abs, they usually mean these muscles that we just described, like the four primary muscles that make up the front and the sides of the waist. And then there's the term core, which complicates things because it depends on who you're talking to. There's a lot of individuality in how people use these words.
00:29:57
Speaker
Core, from an anatomical standpoint, doesn't actually mean anything, but it's a... but It's this concept of the muscles that surround and move and control the trunk. So depending on who's defining it, it might include these abdominal muscles that we discussed, plus your abdominal diaphragm, your breathing muscles, your pelvic floor, and then maybe even like your back muscles, possibly even some of your hip flexors depending because your psoas invests onto the lower back.
00:30:29
Speaker
And so what exactly is included in the discussion of core really depends on who's talking. But sometimes people think of this canister concept with the front and the back, and then the top and the bottom being included with the as part of your core.
00:30:42
Speaker
and Yeah, I feel like we could do a historical documentary about the evolution of the concept of the core in like yeah yoga and Pilates classrooms starting from like the 19 whatever. But yeah, I feel like for majority of people 20 years ago, or maybe 30 years ago, the core was the rectus abdominis.
00:31:02
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. And then it was like, oh, and it's also the obliques. And then Pilates came around. It's, oh, it's the transversus abdominis for sure. And then people started getting into breathing as it relates to the core and pelvic floor function as it relates to the core. And they were like, oh, but it's also the respiratory diaphragm and the pelvic floor. And then some people were like, what about the back muscles? That's the core. And then some people were like, the glutes are also core and so the lats. And...
00:31:25
Speaker
After a while, you're just naming all of the muscles. Holy shit. are the Is the tibialis interior core muscles? Exactly. Someone somewhere is going to say, yeah, it is because. Listen, you can connect anything to anything on your body if you really want to.
00:31:36
Speaker
I think it's important what you said, which is core doesn't really have an established like meaning. So kind of means whatever this group of people says it means. Yeah, exactly. right And then finally, we have the term trunk, which sometimes people use. And trunk is an anatomical term just talking about the part of your body that is not your arms and your legs, essentially, yeah or your head.
00:31:54
Speaker
Or your pelvis, that pelvis is considered a distinct body part from the trunk. Yes. I usually talk about it in class. I'll be like, it's you as a fish. So you don't have legs, you don't have a pelvis, you don't have arms. All right. So it's this idea of like trunk control or trunk training, trunk strength. Those are really rehab terms that we use a lot of the time. All right, the way these terms are used, as I alluded to, tells the story because our language about this part of the body has evolved alongside our cultural attitudes toward exercise or even our exercise related goals and the aesthetic goals we have for a body as it relates to cultural attitudes about the body. In the early decades of modern fitness, the focus for these muscles was mostly aesthetic. Ab exercises meant rectus abdominis exercises, sit-ups, crunches, maybe some leg raises, movements that trained spinal flexion against resistance to target that six-pack muscle. If you grew up in the 80s or 90s, ab work probably meant doing lots of crunches, maybe with a friend holding your feet.
00:32:56
Speaker
um Lots of women's magazines promised flat abs in five minutes with whatever protocol. Then by the early 2000s, this aesthetic focus shifted toward, quote, function. The rise then of yoga, Pilates, the stability ball, which is not a format, but it was this really iconic tool that became associated with core stability, core strength. This became the new buzzword. So,
00:33:20
Speaker
crunches were out, planks were in, especially planks on a stability ball, right? An unstable surface. Gyms were filled with people wobbling on BOSU balls, trying to keep their spine neutral and talking about their core. Yeah. With that shift came another popular phrase, core stability. And what it was talking about was the ability to maintain trunk control.
00:33:41
Speaker
In other words, hold your trunk still under load or perturbation. So this idea of, oh, I'm doing my plank with my forearms on a big stability ball is training my like core stability, right my ability to hold myself still while I'm on this wobbly surface.
00:33:55
Speaker
So it became a genre of exercises that suddenly were like planks, bird dogs, dead bugs, all of these trunk stabilizing exercises right versus versus exercises where you're moving your spine, right like crunches and bicycles.
00:34:09
Speaker
And so most of this shift can be traced back to the influence of our friend Stu McGill. His spinal Biomechanics research in the 1990s and early 2000s really emphasized minimizing loaded spinal flexion to reduce disc injury risk like of herniation.
00:34:25
Speaker
And his work was very valuable in understanding how the spine tolerates load, but it was also widely oversimplified. fitness and rehab communities took his findings to mean that the safest and the strongest spine was one that never moved, right? His big three exercises, the curl up, which is barely a curl up, sounds like you're moving, but you're really not. The bird dog and the side plank became very emblematic of this approach. And over time, they helped cement this idea of don't move your spine as the best way to train your core for a long time. Yeah, this don't move era. Again, birthed even more planks, plank challenges, anti-rotation drills.
00:34:59
Speaker
This just floated into my head when you said plank challenges. Remember when there was that five minute plank challenge? Like yeah you hold a plank for five minutes? Could you hold a plank for five minutes? No. I think I tried it one time and I think I got as far as a minute and a half or two minutes. And I was like, this is dumb.
00:35:13
Speaker
I think I got far. I think I got about as far as you did. Yeah. Yeah. And do you remember when there were pictures of people not that long ago doing planks on fire hydrants and stuff out in the city? Like it was a social media thing. Flagged everywhere. Yeah. Back when social media was in its infancy, there were people posting pictures themselves doing planks in funny places. And yeah. And then anti-rotation drills, which was a big deal for a while in yoga tune-up.
00:35:36
Speaker
People were all about figuring out anti-rotation drills and yeah lots of cues to brace, protect your back, group classes, maybe in yoga, probably in Pilates. They treat spinal motion like a very dangerous thing. Like your spine should never flex, rotate.
00:35:53
Speaker
And if it rotated, you should maintain neutral in the sagittal plane, no flexing and rotating, no extending and rotating. So yeah, the problem with this idea of stability as it's applied in exercise classes is it's not used very precisely. In biomechanics, stability refers to a system's ability to resist displacement after a perturbation and it's something that's observable did you resist displacement or did you not if you did not you you've you know lost balance right and then it's context dependent it completely depends on what the perturbation is what your body position is while experiencing the perturbation how strong the perturbation is right so if stability means the ability to resist or recover from
00:36:38
Speaker
perturbation or displacement, then training it, training stability actually means challenging the system with perturbation or controlled instability. yeah It doesn't mean avoiding movement outside of neutral, but it's come to mean avoiding movement outside of neutral, yeah regardless of perturbation doesn't even come into the picture. It's just like stability is neutral spine. And it's that's a completely inaccurate interpretation of stability. If we're using the biomechanics meaning of it.
00:37:10
Speaker
um And I mean, I would use the word stability in place of strength, or I would use these words interchangeably a lot. And I even sometimes still slip into referring to something as stability when that's not actually what I mean, because I'm not actually perturbing anything. I'm not putting someone in this like controlled instability scenario. I don't mean stability. I mean something else. And a lot of times it's not strength either. So it's just interesting the way that this word has come to be used and interpreted, and it's almost gained an entirely non-scientific meaning in the process. So in research, trunk stability refers to how the torso responds to movement. And it plays a big role, for example, trunk stability plays a big role in fall risk and balance, right? And so, yes, your ability to hold your trunk stable is definitely a big influence on your balance and your fall risk. But in fitness culture, it has come to mean simply not moving your spine out of neutral. and this conflation has reinforced the idea that spinal movement, especially flexion or rotation, is dangerous because it's if neutral is stable,
00:38:10
Speaker
a flex spine or a rotated spine is therefore unstable. And so then we have this mental model that is incorrect, right? It's a misconception. And it's still, I think, influences the way people see movement, the way they interpret it, the way they predict what will happen because of the way someone's moving, the way they program, right?
00:38:29
Speaker
um In reality, the trunk is really stable. Like, It's very stable. and Thanks to its architecture, the vertebrae, thanks to the really strong ligaments that connect all those vertebrae, thanks to the many muscles that produce force, thanks to the pressure regulating system. It doesn't need to be frozen in amber neutral to be safe. Yeah. And in fact, it really shouldn't be. And now there's been so many people who've either coming back from a surgery or an injury where they've been told like, don't lift anything too heavy or don't move your spine too much, where they have this idea suddenly that, oh my God, any movement for the rest of my life is dangerous. And it's really not. Yeah. Pilates definitely deserves a special mention here because it's, I think it's like one of the biggest perpetrators of this word core. So when Joseph Pilates, and I will never not hear the people from maintenance phase calling him Pontius Pilates, but when Joseph Pilates developed his method,
00:39:26
Speaker
In the early 20th century, it was called Contrology. wasn't called Pilates originally. His focus was on coordinating movement, breath, and postural control. It wasn't about getting a six pack. He emphasized what he called the powerhouse, which was his term for the muscles of the abdomen, the lower back, the hips, and the glutes, the center from which all movement should originate.
00:39:44
Speaker
When Pilates... had sort of a resurgence in the nineteen ninety s the early 2000s, powerhouse suddenly got translated into core. And certainly anytime I've heard anyone talk about powerhouse in a Pilates class, they're not talking about your glutes or your hips or your back. They're talking about your abs. They're like pointing at to their stomach and being like, this is your powerhouse. And the focus became on, can you hold this still while you're doing a bunch of other things? Sometimes you're moving a spine in Pilates, but There's a lot of work where you're bracing the spine against movements of your arms and your legs. And as Pilates became more mainstream, the method did, like I said, get distilled down to a lot of neutral spine work.
00:40:26
Speaker
This terrible exercise called the hundredth. I hate so much. You've heard me talk about how much I hate it, but basically you're you're slightly curled up. You're curled up into a mini crunch, and then you just stay there and you waggle your arms a hundred times. That's why it's called a hundred.
00:40:41
Speaker
You're supposed to doturbation That's the That's the perturbation. Yes, yeah exactly. That's the perturbation. yeah It's a fate worse than death. But anyway, so weirdly, this system, and to be fair, there's lots of movements that get into like spinal rotate. like I love mermaids. There's lots of stretching movements.
00:40:55
Speaker
that get into like a lot of side bend and rotation. There's even some trunk rotation movements, but the majority of the work is really about creating this like stable trunk quote unquote, and then moving your limbs around, which is ironic considering how much he emphasized spinal mobility originally. Yeah. I feel like the Pilates at YogaWorks when I was teaching there was more about mobility actually, because the YogaWorks style of teaching yoga was a very much neutral spine focused.
00:41:22
Speaker
And there were like only a very few number of poses where I was okay to exit neutral. And even when you were exiting neutral, you were supposed to be like still working in that direction. right oh my God. I would go to Pilates classes and there's some really good teachers at YogaWorks teaching Pilates. I was like suddenly allowed to flex my spine like deeply and do multi-planar movements that I wasn't doing. You know, I remember just feeling really good after those classes. It's like, wow, I haven't done this in a while. fine in this way and ah It feels good to do it, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So as we see over time, the terms ab strengthening and core strengthening, they began to diverge.
00:42:00
Speaker
Ab strengthening originally meant training the muscles that move the spine, especially flexion, sit-ups and crunches and rotation like bicycles. And then core strengthening shifted to mean training the muscles that resist or control movement around the spine.
00:42:15
Speaker
Many more muscles than just the four abdominal muscles. So we'll see how this distinction becomes, I think, important, specifically when our goal is abdominal hypertrophy later in the episode. Sarah, what's the purpose of the abs? oh I'm so glad you asked. So your abdominal muscles do a bunch of different things. It's not just about moving your spine around. When we talk about it as like ah an abdominal wall, we can think of it like it's this kind of flexible load-bearing structure that when you eat a lot of food, you don't suddenly explode out the front of your stomach, right? So it leaves everything it's protective of those internal organs that are not covered by your ribs, right? So heart and lungs
00:42:53
Speaker
cat covered by your ribs and then the rest of your guts, your reproductive system, your digestive system is just out there, right? So it protects the internal organs and it connects your rib cage to your pelvis, right? It's the in-between.
00:43:04
Speaker
The fiber directions are mechanically oriented to manage both tension and load transfer across the trunk So in other words, it's designed to share load from front to back, side to side, top to bottom.
00:43:16
Speaker
Why does that matter? Because life is full of load transfer, essentially, right? Every time you take a step when you're walking or you run, you bend over to pick something up. you take a really deep breath, you're moving forces between your upper and lower body through your trunk. When it's efficient, when those loads are transferred efficiently, the movement feels really good and it feels powerful and connected. Think of a a pitcher doing that huge windup and then throwing the ball, right? He's got all the power from his lower body, then he's then transferring through the trunk to the upper body for the pitch, right? And it's not an efficient transfer, so you waste force, right? You put extra load or strain through certain body parts and you lose that kind of
00:43:55
Speaker
middle stability, even though it's through movement, you need it to be stabilizing that relationship between the top and the bottom. Yeah. So if you picture walking your dog who squirrel, suddenly lunges, your arms and shoulders get yanked, but your abs, your obliques are what stop you from rotating into next week, right?
00:44:14
Speaker
Or when you carry a heavy grocery bag on one side, your obliques transversus abdominis stabilize your trunk to keep you upright instead of collapsing sideways. so that's load transfer. And the good news is that most of this happens automatically, right? Your nervous system anticipates, coordinates abdominal activation like milliseconds before the movement actually begins in a phenomenon called feed forward activation.
00:44:40
Speaker
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Speaker
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00:45:11
Speaker
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00:45:27
Speaker
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00:45:40
Speaker
Right, your nervous system anticipates, coordinates abdominal activation like milliseconds before the movement actually begins in a phenomenon called feed forward activation. So that's great because you don't need to constantly think about your core, right? You don't need to think about turning on your core muscles. Your brain already has a program running in the background to stabilize you before you move or are moved. Right.
00:46:03
Speaker
But this can become inefficient. It can lose efficiency when it's compromised. So that might be due to an injury. That might be pregnancy, surgery, being very deconditioned. So we've got this idea of this wall. of muscles that's helping transfer load from bottom to top or top to bottom.
00:46:20
Speaker
The other thing that these wall of muscles is doing is regulating the pressure inside your trunk. So if we go back to that image of the core as the diaphragm on the top, the pelvic floor on the bottom,
00:46:32
Speaker
And then the abdominal muscles and the back muscles creating the sides of this cylinder, this canister. When everything's coordinated, you create something called intra-abdominal pressure. And that pressure acts like it's like an internal version of that the weight belt that you see people put on when they're doing like really heavy lifts.
00:46:47
Speaker
And it really is that TA, the transverse abdominus, that is the the starring player here. So when it contracts, it creates that horizontal directional fibers of cinching in like tightening a corset or putting on your cummerbund. That compression increases the intra-abdominal pressure, which in turn stiffens around the spine from the inside and out. It's not locking it into immobility, but you're creating this internal support for force transfer.
00:47:13
Speaker
And so that's the whole reason why when we lift heavy, we a lot time suck in a breath, brace, create that kind of trunk stiffening through the core, right? When you take a deep breath into your belly, you close your glottis, like right top of your throat slightly, and you contract to your abdominal wall.
00:47:27
Speaker
It's creating the same physics as like a pneumatic column. And there's studies like those by Chola Wiki et al from 1999, that show that increase of intra-abdominal pressure significantly enhances both your spinal stability and your load-bearing capacity, how much weight you can take on. Yeah.
00:47:46
Speaker
Okay. In practice, that means that when you squat, deadlift, press, bracing keeps your vertebrae. Vertebra. Vertebra. Okay, brah.
00:47:59
Speaker
keeps your vertebra aligned. Aligned in that you're not just flying out of the position you started in. Basically, you're staying roughly intact from the beginning to the end of the movement. And it helps to distribute compressive forces more evenly.
00:48:11
Speaker
It reduces stress on the lumbar spine in various ways. Without that pressure system, The passive tissues, so your discs, your ligaments, they'd have to do all the stabilizing, which is not their job.
00:48:23
Speaker
And it's not great to subject them to that amount of load. So you to use your muscles and your pressure system to help with that. In 2024, a paper by Sforz.
00:48:34
Speaker
ah Good luck. Sorry. Sforz Soft. Svortsov. Svortsov. Svortsov. There's a K in there. who Confirmed that the transversus abdominis activity directly scales with intra-abdominal pressure during effort tasks, emphasizing that this isn't a cue for aesthetics.
00:48:52
Speaker
it's a pressure regulating mechanism built for protection and performance so when someone says brace use your core to brace what they really mean is if they know what they're talking about coordinate your diaphragm pelvic floor abdominal wall right including that ta to create internal pressure that supports your spine while you move a big weight So we have an episode about breathing and bracing that we'll link in the show notes.
00:49:17
Speaker
We talk about bracing. We have strategies for bracing in it. So we go much more in depth on this idea of bracing there if you want to learn more about it. So in our everyday life, these muscles...
00:49:28
Speaker
of our core are constantly turning on and off at low levels to create this stability while your limbs are moving, right? They control how much you tilt your pelvis when you're walking, how your rib cage stays generally where it is when you reach overhead, how your spine responds to challenges and balance. They're not just on or off, they're fine tuning tension moment to moment to coordinate your breathing, your posture, and your movements. So think about how many things that you do that require this control. Standing up from a chair, climbing a flight of stairs, turning to look over your shoulder, picking up groceries, reaching for the seatbelt. Every one of these movements demands that your abs manage the force between the upper and the lower body so that you don't waste energy or create any strain for your spine.
00:50:09
Speaker
And then there's also ah category we need to talk about, which are these higher pressure events. where the abdominal wall becomes this power generator. So coughing, sneezing, vomiting, laughing hard, the muscles contract forcefully and together with the diaphragm to sharply increase that intra-abdominal pressure.
00:50:29
Speaker
And then that pressure helps expel the air or the vomit or whatever through the thoracic and abdominal cavities. And in these moments, your abdominal muscles and your diaphragm actually reverse their usual relationship. Instead of the diaphragm drawing air in, it pushes down while the abdominal muscles push up and in, and it compresses the viscera and it forces the air or the stomach contents outwards. It's this reflex loop. Your brainstem coordinates this entire pattern. You do not have to, you imagine if you were like, you went out for a bunch of drinks and then you get way too wasted.
00:51:02
Speaker
And then you're like, what do they call it? Praying to the toilet or whatever. You're like, you're trying to throw up. And in that moment where you're drunk and trying to throw up, you somehow have to coordinate your core muscles to make that happen. Like it would be impossible, right? So this is one of those automatic things.
00:51:16
Speaker
Puking under the influence. That's right. Where it doesn't, you don't have to think about it, thankfully. ah and You sound like you have experience with this. What? No. I think I've only thrown up one time from drinking because I had tequila that was bad. And the only other person who threw up that night was the other person that had the bad tequila. How is tequila bad? It's alcohol. it can go like the It can go bad, something to do with the worm. Oh, God. Both of us got real sick. Nobody else got sick at all. Oh, my yeah Yeah, I've had a lot more experience than you then.
00:51:49
Speaker
just like, God. Senior year of college stands out in my mind. look everyone as Everyone needs to go through it. It's a rite passage. So a review on respiratory abdominal coordination by Hodges et al. in 2001 shows that during coughing and other expulsive efforts, the transverse abdominus and the obliques activate milliseconds before the diaphragm, ensuring this pressure builds safely and effectively. So that's the difference between this idea of like core stability versus core rigidity. You need a system that is able to create stability with these kind of small changes moment to moment, but at the same time, isn't so rigid that you can't then use it to upchuck forcefully.
00:52:31
Speaker
The other thing I was going to relate it to is in yoga, in the pranayama practices, there's a type of pranayama called kapalabhati or breath of fire. Yeah. I like that one. Yeah. Where you do repeated forceful exhales through your nose over and over and over and over again as a way to generate this feeling sort of of energy or heat in the body.
00:52:49
Speaker
I always would joke that it was almost better than a Diet Coke at three o'clock. Like it would really wake you up. Yeah, it really And so that's another version of this kind of forced exhale that we're talking about here. Yeah.
00:53:00
Speaker
I learned about the agonist antagonist relationship between the TA and the diaphragm while practicing that, which if you want Kabbalah Bhatti to turn into hyperventilation. So every time you contract your cummerbund and push the air out of your nose, right? yeah Instead of inhaling, like sucking air in your nose, like hyperventilation, right? you You simply relax your TA.
00:53:27
Speaker
And because of that, your diaphragm drops down. And then comes in it's basically a pump. It's very cool. So your abs are in this constant low level conversation with your diaphragm, your spinal extensors, and your pelvic floor. They don't just like suddenly switch on when you're doing a plank and then they're off the rest of the time. They're adapting all the time to keep you upright for breathing, for movements.
00:53:48
Speaker
Posture is not supposed to be this one single place that you hold. It's supposed to be this dynamic movement that is managed with these muscles. So Calantari et al. from 2024 found that when older adults were challenged with unstable standing, the TA was the one abdominal muscle to increase automatic activation. So that suggests that it's really key to postural reflex, not just voluntary effort, like sneezing or coughing. So even when you're standing still, your abs are making these micro adjustments to maintain your balance and your equilibrium. Yeah. And when I think of the TA, I think of it as this muscle that just wraps around goo, right? It doesn't attach to bones. It just attaches to goo. It attaches to fascia. And so it's interesting to think about how would it keep you from falling over if it doesn't attach to any of your bones? It doesn't have leverage on any of your bones, right?
00:54:36
Speaker
Like your quads have leverage on your leg and thigh. And it's because it's modulating pressure and that pressure is increasing trunk stiffness, which is helping you stay stiff, right. And not fall over. It's very interesting.
00:54:49
Speaker
Okay, so this idea that good posture equals sucking in your stomach. Let's talk about this. It equals sucking in your stomach, pulling your shoulders back, locking yourself upright. This has a long and frankly, very weird history. So check out Beth Linker, her book, Slouch, Posture Panic in Modern America. And then also check out our interview with Beth Linker in the show notes.
00:55:14
Speaker
That was a great interview. she was a smarty pants and a lot of really good things to say. Yeah. she's i think the word is historian yes she's a historian she traces how posture obsession took hold in the early 20th century and actually started as a public health effort to monitor spinal deformities in school children and then it morphed into this moral and aesthetic crusade it became shorthand posture became shorthand for self-control for discipline patriotism by the mid-century stand up straight was no longer just a cue it was ah character judgment quote-unquote perfect posture was this ideal particularly aimed at women of course warning that slouching was unladylike lazy sexually suspect the message was that your spine is a reflection of your virtue And that narrative stuck around is why today's wellness advice still tells women to engage their core, stand tall, as if constant tension is a sign of health.
00:56:11
Speaker
But physiologically, the opposite is true true. The trunk doesn't thrive on rigidity. It thrives on adaptability, the ability to respond. Yeah.
00:56:21
Speaker
Yeah. So if you're spending all day chronically sucking in your stomach, you're not actually supporting your spine or anything. you're What you're doing instead is you're interfering with your body's natural pressure system.
00:56:31
Speaker
So if I'm pulling my belly in and up all day, it's going to compress how much my diaphragm can move, right? So it's going make harder breathe. It's going to interfere with my natural pelvic floor tension, which should also be adapting to movement. And it can make my breathing really inefficient.
00:56:46
Speaker
And over time, it can limit my ability to actually generate that pressure, when I need it right? That sort of canister of pressure that I need to do a heavy lift or even to compress the abdominal contents for a cough, right? Your abs are not supposed to be on all the time.
00:57:00
Speaker
They're supposed to be responding to the context, right? They scale up for heavy things when needed. They scaled down for Simpler things like breathing and walking, they coordinate with the diaphragm to maintain this equilibrium of pressure. Posture is not this single place that you're supposed to return to every time and hold and never leave from.
00:57:18
Speaker
It changes with load, with breathing, with fatigue, with your mood. Posture is really about moving in and out of different positions, allowing your body to shift. whole different places, letting your trunk stabilize you wherever it is, however it is, let the movements happen. Your nervous system, in other words, already knows what to do. You don't have to jump in and try to make it do something that is not useful to its function. So let's talk about aesthetics.
00:57:44
Speaker
I want abs versus function. I want strong abs, for example, or I want a stronger core. And let's pull these two very different goals apart because they're goals that people toss around as having, right? People who work out, who strength train. So goal A, I want abs, is an aesthetic goal. You want a visible rectus rectus.
00:58:04
Speaker
abdominus. You want a midsection that's shaped a certain way, probably flat. Okay, and we're going to get into what that possibly means. Goal B, I want a stronger core. I want stronger abdominal muscles. This is more functional because it's related to how we would then use or function with our abdominals, what we'd be able to do, right? Do we want better trunk stability? Do we want better force transfer?
00:58:29
Speaker
Do we want to be able to lift more weight? Do we want to be able to play some sport where the abdominals are crucial, right? So if I chase goal A, which is about appearance, will I automatically get goal B? Will I already automatically improve my function in some context or my strength or my stability or vice versa. If I pursue strength, if I pursue function, if I pursue stability, will I get an abdominal area that appears the way I hope it will, aesthetically pleasing to me or to whomever I'm trying to please with it? Okay, let's dig in.
00:59:06
Speaker
So what does the evidence say about hypertrophy of abdominal muscles? So we know hypertrophy, which is increasing the cross-sectional area of a muscle size, is possible in abdominal musculature. But now does bigger abs, right, this hypertrophy, lead to better functional outcomes?
00:59:25
Speaker
And here's where the nuance kicks in a little bit. In this instance, bigger does not always equal stronger in the exact functional sense that we care about for things like stability under load, force transfer, trunk control. So for example, the 2023 study that Laurel mentioned above about thickness and strength endurance in the muscles found differences in muscle thickness and strength or endurance among subjects, but the relationship wasn't perfectly linear or causal.
00:59:52
Speaker
In other words, thicker muscles often had better strength and endurance, but it didn't guarantee superior functional ability. Yeah. It just makes me remember one of the defining principles of strength, which is that strength is specific, right? So depending on the task you're hoping to achieve,
01:00:09
Speaker
and improve the performance of, right? Your muscle hypertrophy isn't necessarily going to make it so that you can do that. You would have to do that task. So these broader meta-analyses for hypertrophy and strength, they show that these two things align in many muscle groups, but context matters. Training specificity, neural adaptations, movement skills, right? So general muscle size doesn't always translate into a proportionally better one rep max kind of improvement if the movement pattern itself or the neural adaptation is weak.
01:00:38
Speaker
So if your goal is goal a abs for show, you'll get some functional benefit because increased muscle size often correlates with increased strength, but you're not going to have this perfect carryover into complex tasks like heavy lifting or perturbation, posture under fatigue, right? If sit down and I do a bunch of crunches,
01:00:58
Speaker
it's not going to suddenly make it easier for me to find really good trunk bracing for my deadlift, for example. And then if your goal is function, core function, right? Goal B, the like things like stability bracing, movement transfer, load management, hypertrophy alone is going to be insufficient, right? You have to train the function.
01:01:16
Speaker
I have to train bracing under load. I have to train resisting rotation or dynamic stabilization. right If your goal is core function, you're not necessarily going to get the aesthetic of abs that you would get if you were just doing abs for show.
01:01:30
Speaker
right And we're going to talk about why that is. But basically, if you're trying to grow a muscle, you want to expose it to as much mechanical tension as possible. And when you're trying to perform a movement, which is probably complex involving the whole body in some respect, right, that might mean that you don't need to expose that particular muscle group to the most amount of mechanical tension. It means that you're working to coordinate movement across the entire body in a specific way.
01:01:55
Speaker
okay All right. So chasing the six pack or the rectus abdominis hypertrophy as an aesthetic goal for sure can help you build capacity. But if you don't train the task side of what you're trying to be able to do, like brace during a squat, right? Squat is the task, right? Now I need to to be able to brace during the squat or stabilize my trunk so that it doesn't throw my balance off in some type of single leg exercise or within a sport. You are probably going to get your nice abs, but you're not going to necessarily be able to perform these tasks as well as you would if you trained all the muscles involved in that task and maybe even the task itself.
01:02:35
Speaker
Conversely, if you're training for improved function, so you're training to be able to do something, whether it's a sports specific movement, a yoga pose, perhaps maybe it's some kind of strength exercise, right? You can work various different ways using strength training to improve your function in those tasks, but you might not get the hypertrophy outcomes that you're looking for that give you the appearance of that six pack or whatever. Okay, so let's now talk about some physiological factors involved in whether or not we have this appearance of quote unquote, having abs. All right, so what shapes the appearance of our abdomen or what shapes the shape of our abdomen? When people talk about getting abs, what they're talking about is making, again, that rectus abdominis visible through the skin. But think in addition to that, they also mean having ah midsection a lot of times called the stomach, right, which is technically the organ.
01:03:32
Speaker
that we send our food to, but they talk about having a flat stomach or flat, a flat abdominal region. Let's talk about the rectus abdominis being visible first. So the degree to which the rectus abdominis muscle is visible through the skin, and then also the degree to which we can change the shape of our midsection and make it quote unquote somehow flat versus distended from the front. It depends on, I think, four main factors.
01:03:54
Speaker
It would depend on genetics. and structural factors, which we'll talk about. There are also certain medical and hormonal conditions that might impact that. Body composition, which we've already talked a little bit about, but that's that relationship between muscle mass specifically and fat mass. In other words, how much fat is covering the muscle right between the skin and the muscle, making it perhaps so that you can't see that rectus abdominis shape through the skin.
01:04:19
Speaker
And then also hypertrophy, right? Can we make the muscle actually bigger in size so that it shows through the skin more readily? First, let's talk about the genetic and structural factors that would influence the shape of our midsection as well as whether or not we can see that rectus abdominis as a six pack, right? So some aspects of abdominal shape are largely or purely determined by genetics.
01:04:40
Speaker
So for example, the length of your abdomen, like how tall are you? What's your torso length relative to your limb length? And then the length of the rectus abdominis will follow with that. There's a lot of variety in height and torso length. There's also variation in rectus abdominis width and how the muscle bellies, which we've hinted at, are partitioned into packs.
01:05:00
Speaker
So those tendinous intersections that Sarah mentioned, Those fibrous bands of connective tissue that run horizontally across the rectus abdominis, dividing that muscle into these smaller contractile segments, the so-called packs, the number of those and the spacing of those intersections are genetically determined as well. So some people have three horizontal spans, which creates an eight pack, maybe even a 10 pack. I don't know. My brother has an eight pack, I think.
01:05:26
Speaker
and it was like a source of bragging rights. And then There's two horizontal spans, six pack. If there's one, you've got a four pack. If it's uneven, you might have, I got someone who had a five pack.
01:05:40
Speaker
They had three one. They don't always line next to each other. Sometimes they're offset. yeah Yeah. And a two pack on the other side, there's probably a three pack. No amount, this is important. No amount of nutrition or training can create more or fewer intersections or change their alignments. This would be something that's purely genetically determined.
01:05:58
Speaker
Yeah. in addition to the length and width of your rectus abdominis. There's also genetic determinants for the shape of your abdominal cavity and your skeletal structure. So the abdominal cavity itself, like everything, varies person to person.
01:06:10
Speaker
Variation is the norm. So we've got ribcage shape, pelvic shape, spinal curvature. All of this is going to affect how flat or rounded the abdomen appears. Some people, for example, have more anterior pelvic tilt, and it's a structural feature, right? So it has sometimes to do with the sacral base angle and various ways the bones of the lumbar vertebra align with the sacrum and much more, right? So this might give their lumbar curve a little bit of a deeper natural curve, more lordosis. This could cause the appearance of protruding of the abdomen, even when body fat levels are low, right? There's also postnatal adaptations.
01:06:50
Speaker
So here's where we should probably talk about pregnancy. Pregnancy represents one of the most significant and amazing influences on abdominal shapes. So as the uterus expands, the linea alba, that connective tissue seam,
01:07:06
Speaker
at the front of the abdomen between the two halves of the rectus abdominis, which is divided into a right and left half, it stretches to accommodate the growing fetus and it widens, right? So a natural adaptation for that to happen is called diastasis recti. And it typically widens during pregnancy and then goes back and narrows postpartum.
01:07:29
Speaker
But there's, my understanding is there is still this residual widening or thinning of the connective tissue that can persist. And this can create a different shape of the abdomen, right? So it could create a doming or a softness or even just a wider appearance of the abdomen. So I remember noticing that in my body that after I had my baby, i did notice that my abdomen looked a little bit different. It looked a little bit wider. And so diastasis recti is this natural adaptation, right, Sarah? So it's happening because of the need for more space, right?
01:07:57
Speaker
But then there's this problem that women often seek out help for, which is also called diastasis recti, where they feel as though they don't have as much control over their abdomen. The widening is too much, like more than two fingers, I think is considered to be what abnormal diastasis recti or unresolved or it didn't go back, right? It didn't shrink back to its normal width. Yeah.
01:08:19
Speaker
It's either two or pardon of me wants to say it's three fingers. I don't remember. Okay. Yeah, I don't either. know that when I would go in for my checkups with my OBGYN, she was like, looks great. I don't notice anything beyond what is normal. I had a, I would say probably normal, easy pregnancy and then a normal, easy birth, even though I was in labor for like 23 hours, but oh well.
01:08:42
Speaker
I had a great epidural. ah That's when the party started. That's right. But, you know, a couple of years after i had my daughter, actually like a full three, at least after for my daughter, I noticed that I had this like little, like I call it my gremlin hand that pokes out of my abdomen.
01:09:02
Speaker
A little hernia. And I can just like poke it back in and then it'll poke back out and I poke it back in. There's no pain associated with it. I was like, oh shit, I think i have a hernia. And sure enough, I have an abdominal hernia. And I went to my OBGYN here in Huntsville and she had an an ultrasound, ran it just in case to figure out what's going on with this. And it's basically, it's an asymptomatic abdominal hernia. It doesn't hurt, doesn't cause me any issues. I feel like I have strong core, maybe not as strong as it would be, but I don't notice any setbacks or detriments to my ability to do things. So I'm not worried about it. And there's a high likelihood I'll never have to worry about it, but there's a small likelihood that eventually I will have to worry about it if it starts to hurt or if it becomes what's called sequestered if the gremlin hand refuses to go back inside.
01:09:48
Speaker
it's um But until that happens, I'm not going to worry about it. It's like my little mini pack that just pops out. What's that little bump on my belly? yeah And in some cases, this coming back together, that sort of naturally re-narrowing after childbirth does not take place so successfully or the amount that it was stretched makes it even harder for it to go back together. There are surgeries that women can have where they put in like a mesh and things like that. But my general sense is like, they're not great and you want to avoid it if you can.
01:10:18
Speaker
So I think this issue, there's certain abdominal exercises you can work on with a physical therapist to help encourage the diastasis to go back like closer together and should be your first stop. And hopefully you're the only stop that you'll need to make as far as helping to take care of it. but Yeah. It just, people get nervous when they say start to do a sit-up and they see this thing kind of like poof out and they're like, oh my God. But it depends on a lot of things. It depends on how big it is, how long it is, like top to bottom.
01:10:44
Speaker
Is it just like a little, one little pokey bit or is actually like this three inch, four inch long segment that is just really separated. So there's a lot of different conditions that go into your treatment choices.
01:10:56
Speaker
Yeah. And some women are concerned about it partially for that aesthetic concern. Others, it's um it's more of a functional concern. And for some, they literally have pain and that's a red flag and it means you probably need to have surgery or they have this sequestered situation where it won't go back in. And that's the very little that I know about this.
01:11:15
Speaker
I'd be really curious to look into the research on diastasis recti exercises and their efficacy for like putting it right together. Because my perception of these exercises is that they're really low load. yes And I'm like, then if low load exercises don't really change any capacity in the body, why would they have this?
01:11:38
Speaker
so that's not true. back Low load in in terms of like exercise. If the exercise load is too low, it literally will not elevate your capacity. Right. Like it won't change your endurance if it's too low. Right. But this is not an endurance or a strength.
01:11:52
Speaker
load exercises people can use for hypertrophy. Right. I guess it just depends on how low the load is. No. So when I say, i guess, low recruitment. Okay. So maybe that's the better word. yeah which is that these exercise strike me as we're not going until we have one to three reps in reserve. We're doing a couple of exercises and then we're doing a couple of other exercises, sometimes rolling on a ball. And so I'm like, how is this low effort, low load exercise going to change my structure?
01:12:18
Speaker
So exercise that changes structure is exercise that crosses a threshold. Right. And I see these exercises, I'm like, what threshold is being crossed? And I wonder sometimes if just like good old fashioned strength training. All of the exercises really are a variation on good old fashioned strength training.
01:12:34
Speaker
They're just usually like rehab level, which means they're low effort. So my question is if rehab, right, the purpose of low, low, low effort exercises and rehab is typically used to keep someone moving while they're in pain, make it so that movement is tolerable.
01:12:48
Speaker
And they're used to get you to those higher level exercises, right? There's used as a ramp up. Because pain is a barrier, right? With diastasis recti, unless there's pain, right?
01:12:59
Speaker
And in which case, i think one is like you need surgery, right? Yeah. I think in this instance in particular, because we're talking about an area where it's not something where you're doing a movement that moves a joint or connects bone to bone because we're dealing with this area that also has things to do like pressure, right? And these tiny switches when you're making small
Challenges in Exercise Intensity for Diastasis Recti
01:13:20
Speaker
postural changes. I think the thing that holds a lot of these exercises back, I would assume in a PT or rehab perspective is the idea that like, I don't want them doing something that's so difficult that increases the inter-endominal pressure so much that now the hernia pops out, there you right?
01:13:35
Speaker
And so they're trying to figure out where is the level of the exercise where there is no movement, that the diastasis is not like popping, but they can still ah actually do this exercise. So I think it's a very probably difficult to exactly measure or figure out level of effort that you need to pursue. And I too would be very interested to see what the research I want to look at the research because I think all also what is often the case is that very active women who are engaging in activities like CrossFit, right, who are also seeking out an aesthetic change to their diastasis recti, for example, or active women who are engaging in traditional strength training at
01:14:14
Speaker
various intensities also want to change the appearance of their diastasis recti and they end up engaging with these like lower load lower effort exercises in an effort to do my question is what is that actually going to change right yeah anyway i'm going to be skeptical but i'm not going to completely rule it out because i frankly i don't freaking know yeah we need to look at the research more reading of research is needed. That's
Medical Conditions Affecting Abdominal Appearance
01:14:39
Speaker
right.
01:14:39
Speaker
Okay. so there are also other medical or hormonal conditions that will influence the shape of your abdomen. And this is not an area within our scope as movement professionals to influence, right? But there are these physiological medical factors that can either temporarily or chronically change your abdominal shape. For example, gastrointestinal, gastrointestinal, and hormonal factors, right? We can have temporary bloating, or we can have regular bloating if we have food intolerances, irritable bowel syndrome, bacterial overgrowth, right? Things that are altering the gas or fluid retention in the gut.
01:15:15
Speaker
I don't get bloated a lot generally, but I've definitely had times where I've eaten something. And then 10 minutes later, my stomach is out to here. And I'm like, oh God, somebody doesn't like something about what I just put in there, right?
01:15:26
Speaker
Somebody, the gremlin. Apparently my gremlin does not like whatever I just ate. um There's also hormonal fluctuations across the menstrual cycle that can lead to water retention, slower digestion, constipation, right things that will lead to this sort of short-term distension of the belly.
01:15:42
Speaker
But there are other more chronic conditions, health conditions, and in particular, gynecological conditions that can also influence the way the abdomen works. appears that have nothing to do with the amount of fat mass or muscle mass.
01:15:54
Speaker
PCOS, which is polycystic ovary syndrome. This can increase your central fat storage because of these hormonal and metabolic factors, which might give the appearance of a sort of larger abdominal size, even if the person has like moderate overall body fat.
01:16:09
Speaker
Uterine fibroids, depending on how big they are and their location, they can physically expand the lower abdomen or even create some asymmetry in the appearance. Endometriosis, ascites, or even large ovarian cysts can also cause this persistent distention appearance that's unrelated to fat or muscle.
01:16:26
Speaker
Yeah, so I think these are just important to keep in mind because the appearance of the abdomen is shaped by more than fat or muscle. and It's structural variation, connective tissue adaptations, hormonal status, medical conditions, these all play a role in how the belly area looks at rest and in motion.
01:16:42
Speaker
And importantly, Exercise and nutrition won't meaningfully change abdominal shape when the underlying cause is structural, hormonal, medical. Fat loss and hypertrophy can change the thickness or visibility of the abdominal wall, but not factors like fascial widening, pelvic orientation, fluid retention.
01:17:02
Speaker
right, let's talk about
Factors Influencing Ab Visibility
01:17:03
Speaker
body composition. The relationship between lean and non-lean or fat mass, specifically the amount of subcutaneous fat, the fat beneath the skin that covers the abdominal wall.
01:17:14
Speaker
This tends to be one of the bigger determinants of whether the rectus abdominis muscle is visible through the skin. So everyone pretty much has the same basic muscular anatomy with some minor variations, but the rectus abdominis will only become visible when subcutaneous fat covering it is sufficiently low. and That's a systemic body fat percentage thing for those underlying divisions, the pack to pop out. Now the exact body fat percentage at which abs appear, this varies widely.
01:17:45
Speaker
It's different for men and women. Women store more essential fat than men. It also depends on fat distribution patterns, right? We know that around the menopause transition, women tend to store fat more so in their midsection.
01:17:56
Speaker
Everyone's super unique. And so where you uniquely store your fat is also unique to you, right? You might have noticed that you lost weight, but you noticed that you really look like you've lost weight in certain areas of your body and not others as much, right? Everyone loses weight first in a certain area and then it hangs on a little longer in other areas. And again, this is genetically determined.
01:18:18
Speaker
And like we've been saying, for any kind of muscle definition, it's energy balance, right? The relationship between calories consumed and calories expended, sometimes just called calories in, calories out, must tip towards a caloric deficit for long enough to reduce subcutaneous fat in the area where you want to see muscle. Now, my understanding is if this is an area, and this would be a great question for our dietician. yeah If this is in an area where you tend to store more fat and then you're in a calorie deficit, irritatingly, you will see definition or fat loss more first in the areas that you tend to lose fat from first, yeah last in the areas where you tend to store it. So If you tend to store fat around your midsection and you go into a caloric deficit, you might see your arms get thinner before you see your your waistline get thinner. And
Science of Muscle Growth and Effective Training
01:19:07
Speaker
there used to be this idea that you could like quote unquote spot reduce, like you did a bunch of extras. And it was i it really felt like it was mostly aimed at the core, like fear where people wanted to spot reduce. and The thighs and the butt.
01:19:20
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. But people would say, oh, can I just do a bunch of crunches or whatever? that's going to make my abs show out. And the answer is that's not true. It's not a thing. You can't do exercises just in that area of the body in the hopes that area of the body will then let go of its fat mass.
01:19:37
Speaker
sooner. It doesn't work that way. yeah It's systemic. And it's like ah where the fat is lost first is largely genetic, right? So then we get ads for that quote unquote, stubborn belly fat. And unfortunately the core, the belly is the area where it's often last to go.
01:19:53
Speaker
And whatever detox tea that Kim Kardashian is trying to make you drink, you're not going to lose weight from your abdominal area faster because of it. Or if you rub it with a roller or a roller. Yeah. Like a rolling pin. I heard abs were made in the kitchen. I'm rolling out my abs with a rolling pin.
01:20:07
Speaker
Or if you do a ton of crunches, it's not how it works. No. Okay. So we're talking about body composition and we're talking about fat and you can't spot reduce and fat loss is systemic and everyone's going to lose it first in certain areas and it's going to hang on longer in certain areas than others. So now let's talk about hypertrophy.
01:20:24
Speaker
Okay, so that's the lean mass, right? The actual size of the muscles that we're trying to see. So even at low body fat levels, undeveloped abdominals will not appear as prominently, they won't pop out as thicker, bigger trained ones will.
01:20:40
Speaker
And so the other thing about that is that if you do have more subcutaneous fat, the thicker your abdominal muscles are, the more they're still going to be able to show through that, what did you call it? Cozy blanket. The comforter. Yeah.
01:20:53
Speaker
ah So hypertrophy of the rectus abdominis and obliques, which is one of the main goals that people are pursuing with strength training, this occurs through progressive overload. So this is where we have the good news, which is that your abdominal muscles behave like any other muscle, right? When we train these muscles with sufficient resistance, we expose them to sufficient amounts of mechanical tension, which we'll talk about, and we go close enough to failure and we progressively overload these muscles, they grow.
01:21:20
Speaker
And so mechanical tension is a key word we're going to focus on. Now, so mechanical tension is probably the variable we want to pay most attention to. It's kind of a sciencey, wonky term, but we'll figure out what it means here in a second it's probably the most important driver of muscle hypertrophy and so we're going to pay attention to we're thinking about growing the abs when it comes to building muscle like any muscle the abs grow in response to mechanical tension so it isn't necessarily how many reps of an exercise you do or how long you hold an exercise the question is how much mechanical tension did the muscle experience
01:21:56
Speaker
And what mechanical tension is, it's the force that on a microscopic level that the individual muscle fibers are experiencing when they contract against resistance.
01:22:07
Speaker
So inside each muscle fiber, which is synonymous with muscle cell, there's microscopic structures called sarcomeres, which are segments, and these contain contractile proteins, actin and myosin filaments, and these are connecting and sliding past each other during contraction. So when you lift, lower, or even hold a load still, these filaments, these connections, they form cross bridges. And each cross bridge attaches, pulls, releases, reattaches, pulls, releases, and this changes the length of the muscle and it generates tension. And that tension is experienced
01:22:39
Speaker
as force. Tension and force mean the same thing in this case, right? So tension is a pulling force. And it's that tension, that mechanical tension that creates this cascade of signals that tells the muscle, okay, I'm being stressed, I need to actually grow more capable of handling this stress, right? So it makes it so that your muscle actually gets bigger so that there's more protein there's more contractile proteins that are now better capable of handling that resistance in the form of mechanical tension right the more force the muscle needs to be able to produce the greater number of cross bridges form and that tension literally the strain inside the fiber strain is the deformation inside the fiber that's what creates the signal for the cell to to make itself bigger
01:23:21
Speaker
It's how your body knows, right? We need to make this muscle stronger. And the way we're going to do that is we're going to make it we're going to make it bigger. So this kind of mechanical tension we're talking about can be generated during all three types of contraction. Just to review, concentric contraction is when the muscle shortens under a load, like curling up from a sit-up.
01:23:39
Speaker
Eccentric is when the muscle lengthens under a load, like slowly lowering back down from your sit-up. For example, the rectus abdominis, right? Yes, but also the obliques. And the obliques. And then an isometric contraction is when the muscle peruses force without changing length, like holding a plank. All three of them can build muscle, but the amount of mechanical tension, not the type of contraction, determines how much growth you get. so this is where it gets interesting. Research over the last decade has shown that a muscle's length during loading, meaning how stretched or shortened it is, plays a big role in how much mechanical tension it experiences. So when a muscle contracts at a longer length, its sarcomeres are stretched out, meaning there's less of that overlap between the actin and the myosin fibers. So there's fewer cross bridges that can attach, but the ones that do have to produce force.
01:24:28
Speaker
And that increases something called active tension, the force produced by these cross bridges themselves. But then there's more. As the muscle lengthens, we deal with passive tension coming into play. Passive tension comes from the elastic structures within and around muscles that resist being stretched. and one of the most important of these is called titan. It's this, or titan?
01:24:50
Speaker
I think it's titan. Yeah, because titan just sounds dumb. a massive, it's this massive spring-like protein that runs the full length of each sarcomere and it anchors that myosin filament in place. When you lengthen a muscle under load, the titan stretches like a bungee cord.
01:25:06
Speaker
So it adds this internal resistance and contributes to the total tension, even though it's not part of the muscle contraction. So when a muscle is loaded at a long length, it experiences both active and passive tension, right? Active tension from those few cross bridges that can still hang on pulling harder and then passive tension from the tighten and the surrounding connective tissue that's resisting the stretch.
01:25:30
Speaker
Together, these forces create this really strong mechanical signal that tells the muscle to adapt and grow, right? This is why training a muscle through its full range of motion, especially into that lengthened state or holding an isometric contraction while at or close to fully stretched tends to stimulate more hypertrophy than staying in the mid or shortened range, right? Studies in multiple muscle groups, the quads, the hamstrings, the calves, the biceps show this consistently.
01:25:58
Speaker
Loading a muscle while it's long produces more growth. Yeah. I asked ConsenSys, which is an AI tool we use for a review of the literature around a question, right? So the question I asked it was, does full range of motion strength training produce superior hypertrophy results compared to partial range of motion or isometric Strength training. So full range of motion strength training is when you move the joints involved in an exercise through their full range of motion that they could possibly move through. So doing a deep squat versus doing a shallow squat, partial range of motion would be that shallow squat, deep range of motion, full range of motion, deep squat. Isometric would be coming down into the squat and then holding it.
01:26:37
Speaker
right so i wanted to know which of these ways of for example doing the squat or any exercise is going to be superior for hypertrophy and here's what it said it said full range of motion strength training is generally slightly more effective for muscle hypertrophy but partial range at long muscle lengths And isometric training at stretched positions can yield comparable results.
01:27:00
Speaker
So notice that the connecting factor there is that we're lengthening the muscle, right? So full range of motion would expose the muscle to tension under length for a moment. An isometric exercise where the muscle's fully lengthened exposes it to tension while it's lengthened for the entire duration that you're holding it.
01:27:20
Speaker
And then partial range of motion, for example, if you're doing a partial range of motion squat at long muscle lengths, you'd be down, and this sounds awful, you'd be down in the deepest phase of the squat, and then you just come up a little bit, and you go down, and you come up a little bit, and you go back down.
01:27:35
Speaker
It's why I always hated pulses. Like when you hold this and now pulse, you're like, exactly. Now, depending on the movement, you can pulse from a a short muscle length, a medium lengthened muscle or a long muscle length. So a deep squat pulse would be example of the long.
01:27:51
Speaker
still um Most though, caveat, most of this research was done on the lower body. So then I asked consensus the same exact question, but as it pertained to abdominal muscles specifically, and it showed that there hasn't been enough research.
01:28:06
Speaker
Specifically, not enough research that this AI tool has access to. There might be more that it doesn't have access to, but it doesn't have access to the universe of research that's been done. But it said there wasn't enough research to say conclusively, but I think it's plausible to assume that because the abdominal muscles really behave the same way that other muscles do in terms of like strength and growth, that it's very plausible that the same applies to the abdominals. If we want to grow or hypertrophy the abdominals, it's to our advantage to expose those muscles to longer muscle lengths while under load. And that
Historical and Societal Pressures on Ab Appearance
01:28:39
Speaker
can happen through all three types of contractions, right? But to help you visualize what this means as it relates to what we think of as more traditional ways of training the core, think about crunches and bicycles, for example. So in a crunch or a bicycle, Your spine actually never moves into a position where your abdominals are stretched beyond what they would be if you were just standing upright because you're lying on the floor. right So for crunches, you start lying down on the ground. right Presumably, your spine is neutral.
01:29:06
Speaker
And then you curl up, you flex your spine, and this shortens your rectus abdominis and your obliques. right Then you lie back down. Of course, the muscles are lengthening as you're lying back down, but they're not stretching beyond that neutral spine length.
01:29:18
Speaker
which is their resting length. So your muscles are taken to a short muscle length and then they're returned to what they would be at rest, right? Contrast crunches with GHD sit-ups.
01:29:31
Speaker
Okay. So if you've ever seen videos on Instagram of CrossFitters doing GHD sit-ups, it's an exercise that's very common and CrossFit made this exercise famous. GHD is a machine and it stands for glute ham developer. You can do glute and ham work on it, but turns out it's also a great machine for hypertrophying the fuck out of your abs.
01:29:51
Speaker
It looks like a padded bench with a curved pad under your hips. Your foot anchors to another portion of the machine and you start basically in a big old back bend, flying backwards. And this brings your rectus abdominis and obliques into a big old stretch.
01:30:05
Speaker
And then from there, you pull yourself all the way up into a fully shortened position. And then you lie back down and but and it's basically sit-ups on crack. Okay. I've done it and I love it. It feels really good. Yeah. um It looks like...
01:30:18
Speaker
You know, if you've been like I have over but at least a decade indoctrinated into thinking that neutral spine ab work is the only safe way to work your abs, you see it and you're like, that looks horribly dangerous, but it feels amazing. I felt like it felt amazing. Yeah.
01:30:33
Speaker
And if you ever notice, the elite CrossFitters have jacked abs. They really They're just popping out like crazy. Every part of their body is jacked, but their abs are really jacked. So this got me thinking, actually, in the creating of the of this episode outline. You know how in yoga, we do chaturanga to up dog and then back into down dog.
01:30:54
Speaker
and we think of one of the best core exercises that we do in yoga to be the plank, I'm actually thinking that upward dog might be a superior core exercise because it stretches the, or a superior abdominal exercise, I should say, because it stretches the rectus abdominis a lot and it stretches the obliques somewhat as well.
01:31:11
Speaker
And if you're holding it with your legs straight and what's the word, like you're not letting your knees come down onto the ground, you're not letting your abdomen get passive at all, but you're getting that tension stretch in the abs, and then you're taking it from that fully lengthened position back into down dog, which would be back to its resting length.
01:31:28
Speaker
I feel like that might even be a better way to hypertrophy the abs in yoga than plank pose. I wonder if the difference because you're basically describing the same shape of the GHD. It's just flipped over. Yeah.
01:31:40
Speaker
Yeah. Exactly. The change in relationship to gravity means you actually don't, your abs get they really stretched, but I don't know how much you need to use them then to get back to your down dog.
01:31:51
Speaker
I think it would probably be better stretch if you went from down dog right into upward facing dog because you get that eccentric load on the abs much more so than when you're lowering.
01:32:01
Speaker
Yeah. Plank to chaturanga, it's an isometric contraction of the abs. And then you're really relying on your triceps. yes suffering harmax to bring yourself up but going directly from downward dog into upward dog i could see how that might be more stimulating ultimately yoga is not a great way to hypertrophy any muscle group no let's just say that but if there's going to be an exercise that's like maybe one of the better ones and kind of contradicts what we assume is the best one i think dog wins over plank That's just my pet theory.
01:32:31
Speaker
right My pet up dog. All right. So contrast, for example, bicycles, similar to a crunch, but now we just hold the crunch and we rotate right with cable rotation exercises at the gym, which I love, right? We can position ourselves relative to a cable machine.
01:32:46
Speaker
with stack weights such that we can maintain actually a neutral spine in the sagittal plane and then rotate around that neutral spine against varying amounts of resistance, right? That might be a slightly better way to hypertrophy the obliques because we're not shortening them via flexion and then rotating them into even shorter muscle length. We're maintaining some length. Now, if we could somehow figure out how to do cable rotations in a backbended position, that might be even better, but I haven't figured that out yet. Okay. So we don't have enough direct studies on the abdominal muscles to know what type of exercise or approaches work best for hypertrophy. I do think it's still reasonable to assume that they respond similarly to lower body muscles. And we do have a lot of good research showing that if we want to grow our lower body muscles, it's a good idea to expose those muscles to a lot of mechanical tension. So this is going to mean that we probably want to focus on volume, right? Increasing volume, doing lots of sets, right? More is better, actually, as long as we're recovering and then we want to maybe expose the muscle to mechanical tension from a lengthened position, either through full range of motion strength training where we're working concentrically against resistance through eccentric only strength training where we're only lowering the weight or through isometric contraction, but from a stretched position.
01:33:57
Speaker
But given all this, because of stuck beliefs around neutral being the only safe position in which to load the spine, or even stuck beliefs around the idea that we should even load the spine, right? Like we should even add external load to our abdominal exercises. I think that there is a lot of avoidance.
01:34:15
Speaker
around strengthening the abdominals in this way. I think it's just good to remember that the lumbar spine is definitely built to move. Look at it. It's got five vertebrae. There's so many joints that make up the lumbar spine. I think like 15 total.
01:34:29
Speaker
This is a lot of joints. Whenever you see a lot of joints, it means that it's designed for movement. If it weren't designed for movement, you wouldn't have so many joints, right? And so we've got this structure designed for movement, but then we've bought into this idea that we shouldn't move it. I think that needs questioning. If we want this area to be not only strong, but if we wanna hypertrophy the muscles, because maybe we have some aesthetic goal, but we also just wanna keep it feeling good, we gotta move it, right? Full range of motion strength training that's well tolerated, or even partial and isometric types of strength training from lengthened positions are possibly our best bet for hypertrophying these muscles. But generally speaking, we wanna move the lumbar spine.
01:35:08
Speaker
Sorry, the gardener is right outside with a leaf blower? I can't really hear it. Okay, great. He's moving away. I'll just start talking. Okay. So here's something we need to pay attention to. Proximity to failure matters, right? So mechanical tension is going to be highest when motor unit recruitment is highest, right? When we've used nearly all of the available fibers in the muscle, they're all firing to meet the demand.
01:35:32
Speaker
That amount of recruitment only happens when you get in your set of repetitions when you get close to failure, meaning when you cannot actually complete another repetition. there's So there's different types of failure. The most important are mechanical failure, which is that absolute muscle failure when you're so exhausted, you cannot perform another rep versus a technical failure, which is when your form of the exercise starts to break down. You can still muscle your way through it, but it doesn't look like it's supposed to look like anymore. So depending on the exercise, these two types of failure can happen at different times or they can happen at the same time.
01:36:09
Speaker
And with compound lifts, right? Our squat and our deadlift example, we typically work to proximity of technical failure, right? You don't want to keep going, especially once you're getting into loads that are heavier and heavier when your form is breaking down. If your form is breaking down, it's time to stop. right When you're doing exercises on a machine, for example, or sometimes the smaller isolation exercises of certain muscles, you can work really close to that proximity of mechanical failure because you're less likely to have form breakdown happening. And lifting close to failure, right? Within one to three reps of failure is where most hypertrophy occurs.
01:36:44
Speaker
Whether it's a light load, a medium load, or a heavy load, doesn't matter. Heavy loads get to that recruitment threshold faster, but moderate and light loads can get there. it just takes longer.
01:36:55
Speaker
And it's more uncomfortable with a light load, especially because you might be doing like 30 reps of something before you actually get to failure. And but you've certainly been living with that burning sensation for like half of that.
01:37:06
Speaker
set. So this matters because for abs in particular, many people perform low effort, but high rep ab exercises. For Britney Spears one time, there's something like she does 800 crunches a day or something crazy like that. I don't even know if that's true.
01:37:21
Speaker
ah To actually build the abdominals, they have to be trained like other muscles, right? High tension contractions, large range of motion sets that approach failure. Yep. but So let's just reflect back again on why for years, certain movement cultures like yoga, Pilates, even rehab circles have drilled into people in various ways that the spine is safest when it's neutral slash stable, which is a misuse of the word stable and not at as much risk of injuries, therefore protected.
01:37:50
Speaker
Right? So there's this idea that we shouldn't flex our spine, it's dangerous for our discs, so we shouldn't twist under load, because that's dangerous for our discs. We should avoid hyperextension, which just means coming into a big old backbend because that's bad for your back. Yet if we follow the actual mechanics of hypertrophy, all of these ideas are incompatible with the probably most evidence-based optimal way of building abdominal muscles, which is that we have to move our spine fully or at least allow the muscles around our spine to lengthen. And we have to do that under load and we have to do that progressively and we have to actually have those sets feel tough. So just an interesting thing to consider if the goal is I want abs, but I'm afraid of moving my spine out of neutral. I've got these ideas that that's not safe for my spine. Might be worth questioning those ideas.
01:38:37
Speaker
All right, let's cover a couple of exercises. is by no means an exhaustive list. A couple of exercises that do the things that tend to be most conducive to hypertrophy, right? Which is that, and this isn't even talking about the programming.
01:38:49
Speaker
The programming is an entirely separate conversation. Note that for programming, you'd probably be looking at increasing volume more so than Dr. Amy Quinton, Increasing proximity to your Max we don't necessarily need to lift heavy loads to hypertrophy Amy Quinton, hypertrophy and muscle at any load intensity from light to moderate to heavy as long sets are.
01:39:08
Speaker
Ph.D.: Challenging I think for the abdominals, because it tends to be more of an isolation exercise, it probably makes the most sense to work within that moderate to light intensity. just making sure that you're getting close enough to failure. From a programming standpoint, because mechanical tension is the way that we signal to the body to make more muscle, we're probably going to want to expose those muscles to more mechanical tension for more time, time under tension.
01:39:31
Speaker
right? This means that we're probably going to want to ramp up how many sets we are training a particular muscle group with, right? Over the course of however many months, we're progressively overloading our hypertrophy. We're probably looking at increasing volume, right? Sorry, Nathan's coughing. Okay, but programming aside, if we're just looking at exercise selection, we want to look at exercises that are going to bring the muscles that we're trying to hypertrophy, which is the rectus abdominis and the obliques, not necessarily the TA because the TA, again, it doesn't attach to bones, right?
01:40:03
Speaker
We can't really see it that well anyway, because it's deep to the rectus abdominis and it's deep to the obliques anyway. So we're really focusing on the more superficial kind of mirror muscles that we can see in the mirror. A couple of exercise choices you might want to make. These are just example exercises. You might not have access to this equipment, but there might be a way that you could configure a similar setup. So the glute ham developer, if you check out the show notes, will link an exercise on YouTube.
01:40:24
Speaker
so you can see what this is. There's a high likelihood you have never heard of this exercise before. This is probably going to be a great exercise, far superior to things like planks and crunches, because it's going to bring your rectus abdominis into a big old stretch.
01:40:36
Speaker
You've also got the cable machine, which I absolutely love for things like rotations, but also side bends. So moving your spine into lateral flexion and extension and rotating your spine against resistance. This is going to be a great way to potentially create a better hypertrophy stimulus for your obliques rather than bicycles.
01:40:54
Speaker
And so those are just a couple of exercise ideas that you could play with. Obviously, with the side bend movement, which is going to train your obliques, you can also look into things like the Roman chair or the extension, i think it's called like the back hyperextension machine. it's got lots of names, but It's where you hook your heels into like a metal platform that's tilted and then you fold your hips over a pad.
01:41:15
Speaker
If you turn sideways and do lateral flexion and extension, holding onto a dumbbell, that's another exercise I really love. You can also simply hold onto, we teach plate side bends in Lift for Longevity. You just hold onto a plate and then you side bend, lower that plate down towards your ankle and then upright your spine again. Even that is probably gonna be as good, if not better than bicycles.
01:41:35
Speaker
Not only because you can continue to increase the external load on the spine but you can also probably bring your obliques into a bigger stretch longer length in that side bending from a neutral spine we're then gonna laterally flex the spine literally extend the spine the coronal plane then you can in a crunch where you're already flexing the spine so the obliques are automatically short And then you're starting to rotate them a little bit. That's not really going to stretch them. All right. So just a couple of exercise ideas and then play around, maybe get creative, like going from down dog to up dog.
01:42:07
Speaker
Maybe play with some of those ideas because Sarah said that's like the glute ham development machine, but like a much bigger also leg and arm exercise. Yeah. Then possibly a great way to to load your abdominals from long muscle links.
01:42:23
Speaker
Yeah. So we can't just talk about abs without talking about like the sociological, historical, political, everything that is a woman's body, right? It's a battleground. It's symbolic for women.
01:42:38
Speaker
It's, it's a, a bill, your abs are a billboard for everything from virtue to desirability to self-discipline, right? If you are pursuing a six pack, you're stepping into a a long history of how women's bodies have been policed and aestheticized, especially.
01:42:54
Speaker
this waist and belly region. And it of course also reflects on a woman's reproductive quality, right? You want to have that narrow waist to wide hips ratio is self-selective for, oh, she's going to be a good breeder, right?
01:43:11
Speaker
put it so I know. It's true. So if we go way back, right, this idea of a waist as a visual marker for femininity has gone on for centuries. This idea of what used to be called in the late 1800s, early nineteen hundreds the quote unquote wasp waist, which if you look at a wasp's body, it's got a sort of big thorax then it narrows, right? And so that's the what a woman is also supposed to look like, right?
01:43:35
Speaker
This very dramatic narrowing from the rib cage to then a small waist, and then the curves, like the hips then rather curve out, right? It's not the shape of a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. It it probably also is. And the way they achieved this at the time was in those very like tight lacing corsets where you're just getting pulled in, pulled in, pulled in, right? It's an aesthetic, but it's also a manner of control, right? It controlled your movement. It controlled your posture, right? Medical writings at the time warned of like respiratory issues, musculoskeletal issues, reproductive complications from this like severe coarsening. Of course, right?
01:44:10
Speaker
Sounds awful. Broken ribs probably. Yeah. When we talk about abs today, we're still talking about that same idea. The message has evolved, right? We're no longer holding onto a bedpost while somebody like yanks the cords of your corset as tightly as they can, right? It's not the same look that we're looking for, but it's still a signal around your self-discipline, your desirability, your fitness.
01:44:34
Speaker
The message has changed a little, but the symbolism has not changed. So let's talk about century aesthetic ideals. In the early 20th century, the ideals shifted. So we had the 1920s.
01:44:47
Speaker
In the 1920s, it was all a little bit boyish, right? The slimmer, more boyish figure for women was in rather than the heavier, curvier figures. Then, by the mid-century and onward, fashion media advertising began cultivating this idea of a narrow waist, invisible abs, and a flat belly. So here's where we had bikini beach culture, fitness magazines, and this hourglass figure, this bust, waist, hip, ideal measurement. and This became shorthand for feminine perfection.
01:45:19
Speaker
Ever heard the phrase 36, 24, 36? That's 36 inches for the bust, 24 for the waist, 36 for the hip. This became deeply ingrained in popular culture as a perfect standard. It also sounds like the combination for a lock.
01:45:37
Speaker
you remember that song, ah Brick House? She's a brick house. So at one point he goes, 36, 24, 36. It's a call out in that song. yeah Interesting. yeah So even if the numbers are mythologized, the effect has been potent, women's waists, and the implication of abdominal shape, flatness, maybe musculature, this became central to desirability.
01:46:03
Speaker
Yeah. And then if we fast forward to the 1980s, I don't know if you remember this. And I was in England at the time, but I'm assuming this was like not just a campaign in England. So the serial Special K, which I believe still exists. I'm not a big serial killer.
01:46:17
Speaker
They had this whole campaign about, can you pinch an inch? ah Do you remember this? Were you exposed to this? Nope. I don't remember the serial. I don't remember the campaign. So the idea was you took your hand to your waist and you grab.
01:46:31
Speaker
And if what you can grab is more than an inch, something is wrong with your body and you need to be eating special K, right? Diet cereal, right? So- But now it's turmeric supplement.
01:46:44
Speaker
Right, now exactly. we've ah There's always some something you should be eating, but right but now suddenly we're really zeroing in on a really specific target. Can you pinch an inch? And if you can,
01:46:54
Speaker
you are not disciplined enough. You do not have enough self-control. You're a little fatty, whatever. So like subliminal or not so subliminal messaging yeah takes place. So it's not just like about, can I see the abs on the front of your body? It's like, why don't you have enough self-control so that when you go to pinch there, you can't pinch an inch of flesh. The visual message became ah moralistic message around how good of a person you are is based on whether or not you have an inch worth of flesh to grow. mean, if I try to do it now, i get a good inch on the side of my body yeah I squeeze in my waistline. But like some of that skin, I mean...
01:47:35
Speaker
Some of it's subcutaneous fat. I don't know what else it is, but like- there There is such a thing as body composition estimates using calipers, which I had to learn about when I did the CSCS. And it's it's pretty inaccurate way to- Oh, sure. That's body composition. But it sells diet cereal.
01:47:51
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So that was the to the eighty s to the nineteen ninety s Yep. okay And then when did visible abs become permissible for women? Historically, visible abdominal musculature in women was rare outside of athletic,
01:48:08
Speaker
female populations or bodybuilding context. So for much of the 20th century, women were told to be slim, maybe tone, but not muscular in a way that we would now reference as like the six pack. Over the last couple of decades, we've seen now a shift in fitness culture. Social media is a big part of that.
01:48:28
Speaker
And then female athletes have helped to normalize women having visible abs, having a hypertrophied rectus abdominis and having defined midsections where you can actually see the musculature. Yet often still just enough, not too much. The caveat is like women can have muscles, but not, it shouldn't offend me. It shouldn't be too prominent. It shouldn't make me feel somehow self-conscious.
01:48:52
Speaker
You're allowed to have muscles, but not too much. There's also, I want to say that there's this like really pernicious, awful connection that I'm noticing on social media between women being musculature and anti-trans sentiments.
01:49:06
Speaker
Like as soon as a woman shows up on social media and has muscle on her body, the anti-trans people are in the comments going, she's a man. oh And like referencing her as a he and... making all kinds of like really hateful trans hating comments.
01:49:20
Speaker
Yeah, that yet another way that women's bodies are policed. And also a way that like, basically, I think trans phobia and misogyny are very intimately connected.
01:49:31
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. So why is this an area that we're so obsessed with and slash so insecure about? It's metaphorically, it's the central zone, right? It sits in the middle between the top and the bottom. So it's this very like visually potent area.
01:49:47
Speaker
It's an area where like women's bodies in particular go through massive changes, right? Pregnancy, postpartum, changes around where your body composition is during menopause, right? All of these changes tend to then...
01:49:59
Speaker
get tied into fear-mongering language, concerns about this area, right? Things that are changing that that are outside of your control. There's also the fact that women have higher percentage of body fat.
01:50:10
Speaker
Yeah. Just at baseline. And that's healthy. That's normal. Yes, exactly. You're supposed to, right? So because we've had these cultural ideals of very narrow and prescriptive shapes that everyone's supposed to fit into, right? So this like the hourglass figure or the flat belly or having visible abs, if you're not within- that category, it becomes pathologized, right? You carry fat in your midsection, then you are, you're unfit, you're undisciplined, you don't have control.
01:50:38
Speaker
You're not able to like diet properly or whatever, right? It's a way to feel bad about yourself, right? And it's also a way to continue to try to normalize these ideas about what does a female slash feminine body look like versus what does a masculine body look like. So like a feminine body, you have a narrow waist, hopefully also then hips, because that means I can make babies with you, right? It's feminine to have a slim middle section, right? In theory. And so when a woman develops too much visible musculature, there's often a backlash. And to your point about
01:51:12
Speaker
people coming in and claiming someone's trans when they just put on some muscle, right? It's too masculine. It's too muscular, andre not feminine enough, right? So for a lot of women, this kind of internalized messaging means that there's only a certain amount of ab hypertrophy that is acceptable, right? There's very tight boundaries around what exactly your core is supposed to look like.
01:51:33
Speaker
And then we have the massive marketing machine that is just aimed at making you feel bad about yourself no matter what. It'll find something, right? ah So whether it's ads for diet cereal, like pinching an inch or shapewear, right?
01:51:48
Speaker
Waste trainers. TV show, The Biggest Loser. Right? Oh my God, that's its own that's its own entire episode. Let's just find an entire show about hating. Hating yourself. ye This waist trainer thing was really the rage here maybe five years ago. had people hiking with waist trainers on, this kind stuff. and I'm like, it's just a corset. It's not training anything.
01:52:07
Speaker
I hope you realize. Like you take it off, nothing will have changed particularly underneath. But anyway. Is my sweatband that I wear when I run a brain trainer? It is. It's training your brain. It's a skull trainer. It's squeezing your skull smaller to fit more tightly around your brain.
01:52:21
Speaker
My socks, are they foot trainers? They sure are. You're getting the idea. Um, you know, and all this does is just give women more anxiety, more self-loathing, more money spent on tools that don't do what they're supposed to do to fix problems that you don't actually have. It just, it moves us away from acknowledging the huge diversity in body shapes that are out there and getting away from this kind of punishing attitude that a lot of women have towards their bodies because of this internalized
Shifting Focus to Performance Goals
01:52:48
Speaker
messaging. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So what should we keep in mind about getting abs if we want them, Sarah? You've got them already.
01:52:54
Speaker
They might just be being kept toasty under a layer or something. yeah You can train for hypertrophy. If you want them to stick out, you just start doing more core exercises, but that doesn't necessarily transfer to functional things you want to do. And genetically, it might not make one shred of difference.
01:53:14
Speaker
And then there's also body composition. Exactly. Consideration of maybe it's going to involve fat loss. And so if but nobody wants to hear. Yeah. But. Nobody wants to do that part. Yeah. Part of being able to see something deep to the skin is getting rid of the thing between the skin and the thing you want to see, which is in this case muscle. And it might take a lot of diet related work that you may or may not want it to do. Yeah. and maybe and maybe it's also helpful to know that if you do want to pursue seeing abs, like that it's not that you need to buy a special cream or a special fascia blaster. And it's also not that you need to wear a waist trainer or that you need to take turmeric, but that it's literally like you need to be in a calorie deficit. And while that isn't easy, it's at least a much simpler message.
01:53:57
Speaker
And it's at least true. Yes. as Well, I mean, the one thing I think about a lot of the time with all of this kind of like body image, body shape kind of stuff is you have some amount of a natural body weight that your body naturally likes to maintain.
01:54:14
Speaker
Yep. And if you have nutrient dense meals, if you try not to overindulge in calories and you exercise, you are going to land at what that shape basically is. And you can obviously modify it with diet if you want to, but I would say an even faster, easier approach is to just start to be okay with what you look like. And then you don't have to change anything.
01:54:38
Speaker
I think, kind of piggybacking off of that idea, that a wonderful way to focus less on what you look like is to focus more on what you can do. Amen. And to maybe make one thing you focus on as it relates to your abs, what you can freaking do with them.
01:54:55
Speaker
There you go. Which you might already be focused on what you did with them, which is i had a baby. I fucking moved into this house somehow with my abs. I squat and lift weights and whatnot. And I do all these things with my abs because the abs are basically involved in everything. But you might also set some performance goals.
01:55:11
Speaker
Okay, I think performance goals are one of the best ways to be pursuing aesthetic goals without the focus on aesthetics, which sometimes be a bit of a head fuck, a bit of a downer, especially in this fucking capitalistic society and social media. So focusing less on what you look like and more on what you can do. And that in and of itself might be a much more positive reframe to this, at least the goal of hypertrophying your abs, if some of your performance goals relate to exercises that are conducive to hyper-driven your abs.
01:55:43
Speaker
And additionally, you might let go. Potentially, once you get interested in what you can do, you might let go a little bit. You might loosen your grip um on what it looks like, right? Because sometimes it's that reframe. It's that...
01:55:56
Speaker
mental shift away from focusing so much on appearance and more so on function and ability that can just be a really like lifting a heavy weight off your shoulders in a sense, like the one that was put on your shoulders from the time you were born until now as a girl, as a woman.
01:56:13
Speaker
Set that aside and really go wholeheartedly toward some goal, some measurable objective goal, whether it's I want to train my abs using these exercises,
01:56:26
Speaker
during the week and be consistent with that, or I want to PR these exercises while training my abs, or I want to be able to do something that demonstrates a significant amount of core strength. Maybe it's a handstand, maybe it's a heavy squat, maybe it's some direct ab exercise. I think that this is a really positive way to possibly be pursuing the aesthetic goal of abs without really focusing on the aesthetics as much.
01:56:52
Speaker
Amen.
Season Conclusion and Future Content Tease
01:56:53
Speaker
Oh, hey, that's it. That's it. We just answered the question, how to get abs. You're welcome. Mustard's, he's freaking out. Can you hear him going?
01:57:04
Speaker
mean Okay, good. I can. And I'm like, i hope the listeners can't share. He's losing his mind. got to go pet his abs. Give him little belly rub. That's all we have for you folks. Again, cart closes on Lift for Longevity on Saturday. We probably aren't running this for another 12 months actually.
01:57:21
Speaker
Yeah. So you may want to get away. can. ah Head to the link in our show notes, the shink in our low notes. That's right. Yeah. Click that shink and line up.
01:57:33
Speaker
That's right. All right, everybody. Thanks so much. This is the last episode of season seven and seven. But we'll be back in two weeks with what we're calling our in-betweeny. And it's going to be, I believe, an interview with a former personal trainer of mine all about youth strength training. Fun.
01:57:51
Speaker
Should they strength train the youth? The youth. The youth. The youths in question. We're going to talk about it. Thanks. See in two weeks.