EUGENIZATION.

(Image Credit: Julielohre.com)

It’s been a longstanding tradition (well, longstanding from a bodybuilder’s perspective, anyway) that each individual muscle group has to be blitzed, bombed, and blasted in order to get the most out of it. In other words, there’s no way for you to really work a given muscle group unless you devote an entire training day to it. And there’s no other muscle group where this effect is seen moreso than abdominals.

Everyone loves training abdominals. Even people who downright hate exercise love to train abs. The reason, of course, being that we’re all walking around with The Bodybuilder’s Creed firmly entrenched in our heads: If I burn the heck out of a muscle, I will literally etch out the muscle shape I desire, and torch off the fat that obscures it.

Ah, if that were only true.

Here is the unbiased Truth about abdominal muscles: They become visible when the overlying fat covering them disappears (as in, you diet sufficiently to lose the required body fat), and they are best worked heavy and hard, not for countless reps of mere bodyweight.

Here’s a Corollary to the Truth: You don’t even need to work the abs directly for significant muscular stimulation.

Go ahead, read that again. Yes, you read correctly - you don’t need to work the abs directly to get a six-pack; what’s important is that you carry sufficiently low bodyfat levels and that the ab muscles get worked somehow. As in, say, supporting a heavy load in a full-body exercise, like the squat or deadlift; or in supporting and stabilizing the rest of the body as it strains against a load, as in chinups or pulldowns.

You don’t have to take it on faith. Here’s a study that states just that (and I quote):

The results of the present study indicate that the use of moderately high (80% 1RM) intensity resistance while performing dynamic exercises, such as the squat and deadlift, can provide greater dorsal trunk activation than similar exercises without external resistance or calisthenic-style instability activities. (emphasis added)

Translated into English: Lifting heavy things works the core plenty. Plenty.

So, you may ask: Why work the abs at all? Is it merely superfluous? All for show (and naught)?

Here are some valid reasons to perform specific, targeted work for the trunk muscles:

1. Teaching or learning muscular activation (”talking” to the muscle).

Hard as it may be to believe, there are individuals in this world who don’t communicate well with their muscles. Not in the sense of whispering, “Grow…grow…grow…” to their biceps, but in identifying and contracting specific muscles. Want to know if you’re one of them?

Here’s a test: Take a gallon of milk and lift it over your head. What muscles did you use? What areas did you feel working? Did you sway around back and forth? If your answer to any of these questions is, “Gee, I don’t know”, then you may be a candidate!

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this, by the way. If your exercise form is good, you can chug right along and get decent results from your efforts. But learning how to effectively contract, feel, and activate specific muscles in a movement will definitely improve both your performance and your results.

2. Correcting a weak link.

Keep failing on that deadlift and don’t know why? Do your abs fatigue before your arms or back when you do pullups? You, my friend, may be in serious need of some abdominal specialization work. If you find that proportionally your abdominals are not as strong as the rest of your body or you prematurely fatigue on exercises due to ab weakness, then doing specific ab work not only a great idea, it’s mandatory.

3. Additional strength needed in a sports/performance related context.
(Also implied: 3b. To prevent injury.)

Does your sport/avocation require unusually high levels of ab strength?

Hint: If your chosen sport is jiujitsu, golf, or tennis, the answer is yes.

Specific abdominal work is also useful in order to improve athletes’ abdominal force output (i.e., increase ab strength) and to protect athletes against injury.

Yes, even amateur ones, like you and me.

So there you have it. In summary:

• Most casual exercisers don’t need direct ab work and are better off spending that time learning to work hard on the exercises that do matter (and deliver results): squats, chins, deadlift, presses, etc.
• To see your abs, attain and sustain low body fat levels.
• Working the abs directly is warranted if you’re looking to teach someone how to communicate with their abs, to correct biomechanical “weak links” in exercises, and if you need specific abdominal strength to perform at high levels or prevent injury.