Why? Because they fail to deliver the total package: a strong, athletic core that looks great, staves off injury, and actually improves performance in the gym.
If you want to have it all, you need to move beyond high-rep, one-dimensional abdominal exercises. Crunches, leg raises, and the deluge of isometric "anti" core exercises are good places to start, but they're not enough.
The human body is built for integrated movement across multiple planes and joints, which means your core muscles don't work in isolation. Rather, they work synergistically to create, absorb, stabilize, and facilitate movement with the rest of the body.
This happens in all three cardinal planes – sagittal, frontal, and transverse – which is why it makes sense to categorize core exercises along these lines rather than narrowly focusing on spinal movements like flexion, extension, and rotation.
Like the legs of a stool, each plane contributes to the movement of the whole. A program that integrates all the muscles involved in each plane translates into better real-world performance.
Here's how to do it, starting with the sagittal plane:
Humans are sagittal plane animals. Most of our lives are spent either moving back and forth, up and down, in a straight line, or balancing forces that occur during these movements. To create and stabilize sagittal plane movement, we rely on three primary muscles: the hamstrings, rectus abdominis, and external obliques.
Think of this as a leg raise for your upper body, only you use your arms as the levers instead of your legs.
One of the primary roles of the abs is to transmit forces between the upper and lower body. In theory, that equates to isometric strength, which is why a lot of abdominal drills are done holding a static position.
The trouble is, in the real world of performance and athletics, you need a stable spine and rib cage because other muscles and joints are producing contrary and opposing forces. That's exactly what this exercise emulates.
Front planks aren't anything new. Still, most people butcher them because they lack body position awareness. Putting the feet, especially the heels, against the wall provides a tactile reference point to activate the hamstrings and hold the pelvis in position against gravity.
Lateral weight-shifting, side-bending, and thoracic abduction – pushing your shoulders to one side without bending the spine laterally – are the hallmark movements of the frontal plane. The primary muscles in these movements are the internal and external obliques at the rib cage and the adductors at the hips.
Inchworms combine sagittal and frontal plane muscles into an integrated exercise for the upper and lower body.
Walking and running involve both forward propulsion and shifting our center of gravity from side to side as we transition weight from one foot to the other. To do this effectively requires the coordinated action of our obliques and adductors to keep our center of gravity over our base of support.
Chops and lifts are an easy way to introduce force vectors into the frontal and transverse planes. Here, we take a traditional cable chop and concentrate the load in the frontal plane by adding a lateral weight shift, stacking the shoulders and hips over one foot.
Transverse plane exercises build rotational competency for throwing, punching, reaching, swinging, and pulling with one arm. This happens through a combination of internal and external obliques, turning the rib cage to one side or the other with the glutes rotating the pelvis in the same direction.
Get-ups are a great way to integrate shoulder, rib, and hip mechanics in a single move, but you don't always need to do the full exercise. Adding the angled hip bridge from the elbow-supported position allows you to keep the focus on your abs while pulling the nearside glutes into the equation for extension and external rotation.
The landmine is a great tool for loading rotational movements in a way that medicine balls or bodyweight exercises can't.
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