Stop saving ab exercises for the end of your workout. Here's how to activate and train your core properly.
- It's a mistake only to perform core exercises at the end of your workout, human movement specialist and elite personal trainer Luke Worthington explained to Insider.
- Most people regularly miss an essential part of their warm-up: core activation.
- Unlike training, which should be done to fatigue at the end of your workout, activation is about switching on the muscles so they can support you.
- Worthington explained to Insider both how to activate your core muscles properly, and also how to train them, working across three planes of movement.
- Hammering your core at the start of a workout, or as a workout on its own before going back to sitting down, is "potentially really quite dangerous," Worthington said.
Whether you're doing an instructor-led class or working out on your own, most people save their ab exercises till the end of the workout.
However, this is in fact misguided.
What you should in fact be doing is core activation work as part of your warm-up to prime your body for what it's about to do, but that should be light.
When it comes to actually training your core — working the muscles till they fatigue like you would with other body parts — that should be performed at the end of your workout so that your core muscles can still support you in every exercise you do.
Human movement specialist and elite personal trainer Luke Worthington explained all the above to Insider, breaking down exactly when, why, and how you should train your core to support your all-around fitness.
Most workouts miss out activation work
There's a "low barrier to entry" when it comes to qualifying as a fitness instructor or personal trainer, Worthington said, adding that the importance of core activation is not well enough understood.
"It's a wider issue in the industry," he said.
"Activation should be part of movement prep or warm-up, but this is actually something that's quite lacking in the exercise class area, in most of the 'pre-packaged,' delivered stuff."
"Some trainers think 'warm-up' just means getting warm, so they make people do some high knees or jump around a little bit. Whereas actually that's not the purpose of a warm-up."
In fact, Worthington doesn't like to use the term "warm-up" because it's misleading in this way.
He prefers "movement prep."
"Because then people think, 'Oh, I should probably do this because it's preparation for what I'm about to do,'" said Worthington, who has a six-week dedicated Core Training Guide designed to be used from a mobile device.
The aim of this movement prep is to activate the muscles that you want to use and connect the brain to the body, and this can be done in a number of ways.
The core, as well as the glutes, are "fundamental to absolutely everything," Worthington said, and he thinks of core activation like "putting on your seatbelt" before you set off.
"So activating those muscle groups should be part of everybody's movement prep," whether you're then going on to mobility exercises, corrective work, or anything else.
"It's a super important muscle group because it allows you to get into the best position to then do the workout that you want to do," he added.
There's a difference between training and activation
While activation of the core at the start of a workout is important, you don't want to be training those muscles as such, and there's a difference between the two.
"When you're training something, you're trying to stress it, you're trying to create fatigue," Worthington explained.
In training, you're trying to overload the muscles to lead to an increase in strength or endurance or whatever your goal may be.
Overloading your core muscles before you even start your main workout — training rather than simply activating them — is not wise.
All you want to be doing is switching the muscles on, waking them up, and reminding your body how to use them.
If you fatigue the core muscles, you then can't use them.
This is why core trainingshould come at the end of your workout, when you're not doing any other movements afterward.
Doing a dedicated, say, 20-minute core workout and then going and lifting weights or doing a HIIT class could lead to big problems, according to Worthington.
How to activate your core before working out
There's no real difference between the exercises you could do to activate and train your core — it comes down to the intensity and load.
For activation, you should keep both load and intensity low.
What you want to ensure you're doing is really connecting to the muscles you want to use later in your workout, whatever those may be.
So if, for example, you find you're feeling your quads rather than your glutes working when performing squats, that could be due to not activating the glutes sufficiently first.
"If you get that right, there's a very good chance you'll be working the muscles that you think you're working, but it's not guaranteed," Worthington said.
"So being able to consciously and specifically activate muscles is a really key part of getting the training effect that people want."
For activation of any muscle, you could do one or two sets of a few reps with no load, just enough for you to feel how to turn a muscle on.
When it comes to the core, Worthington recommends dead bugs, because they're hard to get wrong and it's easy to feel the exercise.
To perform a dead bug, you start by lying on the floor with as much of your spine in contact with the ground as possible.
Raise your arms straight upwards towards the ceiling and create a table-top position with your legs bent at 90 degrees both at the hip and the knee. Your shins should be parallel to the ground and the ceiling. This is your starting position.
From there, you lower one arm above your head whilst simultaneously stretching out the opposite leg (keeping it off the floor), pushing your heel away from you, exhaling as you do so, and maintaining contact between your spine and the floor.
Return both outstretched limbs to the starting position before performing the movement on the other side.
Core activation only needs one or two exercises, just enough to feel the muscles engaged.
Training your core requires progressive overload just like any muscle
When it comes to the actual training of your core, you need to apply the principle of progressive overload, just like you would with any muscle group, if you want to see results.
Essentially, this means gradually challenging yourself more.
For your core, this could be holding a position for a longer period of time, increasing the reps, adding more resistance, or shortening rest periods.
"What you're trying to do is create fatigue," Worthington said.
"It's no different to deadlifts, pull-ups, sprint training, whatever it is you want to do, you've got to create the stimulus to get the training effect."
For a well-structured core workout, you need to work across three planes of motion: sagittal (forward and back), frontal (side to side), and transverse (rotation).
Sagittal plane movements include dead bugs, planks, and rollouts, frontal plane movements could be side planks and some throws and chops, and transverse plane movements include cable rotations, landmines, and many medicine ball exercises.
Breaking up a sedentary day with a core workout isn't wise
It's problematic, Worthington said, when people take a break from their normal sedentary lifestyles to "hammer an abs workout," then go back to sitting down at work.
"That's probably the worst thing you could possibly do because what you're doing is completely fatiguing and annihilating the muscles that you need to use to sit correctly at your desk," he said.
What would be a better option to get some movement into your lunch break would be stretching out with a yoga flow or mobility routine which included some core activation.
"If somebody did some core activation in the middle of their working day, as part of an overall cardio, mobility, yoga, or strength workout, whatever it might be, and then went back to work, that would be fantastic," said Worthington.
"But pushing their core musculature to the point of fatigue and only doing that, and then going back to work, is actually potentially really quite dangerous."
When you know how to train your core properly, it'll support you both in your workouts and your day to day life.
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