When we look at core strength and stability, we need to carefully define what these terms actually mean. In 2003, Hall defined stability as ‘resistance to both angular and linear acceleration, or resistance to disruption of equilibrium’. This basically can be broken down as the ability to withstand unwanted movement. Strength is defined by Kraemer and Knuttgen and Kraemer as the maximal amount of force a muscle or muscle group can generate in a specified movement pattern at a specified velocity of movement.

By looking at these two definitions we can see a big difference between core stability and core strength. Core stability can be understood as the ability of the core to resist an unwanted movement. Core strength can be identified as the amount of force the core can produce to perform a desired movement. These can clearly be seen as two totally different functions, yet they are both totally interdependent on the other. If an exercise class or modality promises to improve core strength and the majority of the exercises involve static postures while activating the core, are they training core strength or stability? In reality, they are improving stability and not strength.

What also needs to be identified is how to train the core to be stable. According to physical therapist Shirley Sahrman in her book Diagnosis and Treatment of Movement impairment Syndromes the abdominal muscles need to 1. appropriately stabilize the spine, 2. maintain optimal alignment and movement relationships between the pelvis and spine, and 3. prevent excessive stress and compensatory motions of the pelvis during movements of the extremities. To stabilize the spine we need to ensure activation of all the abdominal musculature and in what way we want the spine to be stable. At DC Health we consider spine stabilization to be the maintenance of a neutral spine under load and the resistance of rotation.

Training the core to resist rotation may seem like a strange idea. In fact, many core strengthening programs try to increase rotation, particularly at the lumbar spine. This is not a good idea, as the lumbar spine only rotates between 3-18 degrees. We generally find in our assessment protocol that our clients who suffer from low back pain actually are overly mobile at the lumbar spine and suffer from immobility at the hip joints and the thoracic spine. The mobility of these two vital areas will be addressed in another post. Mobility has become a huge topic in the fitness industry with people creating mobility exercise for every joint in every plane of motion. In reality though, some joints are inherently designed for stability, not mobility, and increasing mobility at these joints is asking for problems.

We need to teach the core stability in the frontal plane, transverse plane, the anterior sagittal plane and control of the pelvis and lumbar spine. At DC Health we have designed an integrated protocol for assessing a client and taking then through these progressions to ensure optimal stability development. Some of the exercise we use are:

Side Bridge: This exercise is excellent for developing frontal plane stability and poor performance in this exercise is a good indicator of an increased risk of lower back pain.

Forward Ball Roll: This exercise integrates the core with the hips and the arms and is a great exercise to train the anterior core.

Lower abdominal co-ordination – This exercise trains synergistic action between the external obliques and the hip flexor musculature.

Pallof Press: We use this exercise to train the abdominal muscles to resist rotation.

After we have developed optimal stability we will then look at developing core strength. The strength we will develop will take into accounts what activities a person performs and their particular goals. Some of our favourite exercises are:

Cable Wood Chop: This is a great exercise to integrate the hips, core and upper extremity to express force.

Medicine Ball Toss: Another fantastic exercise to develop strength and power. Also teaches you how to absorb force, which is very important in athletic situations.

When looking at exercise programs and what they promise we need to look at all programs with a healthy degree of skepticism. If we can critically analyze what is being done and the methods used we can easily see what approaches are effective and which ones are ineffective. Remember there is no such thing as a bad exercise, there is only a poor prescription of an exercise which is due to poor understanding of the biomechanics involved.

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So, here we go…

With flattening the abs many factors have to be taken into consideration. It is not as simple as exercise and cutting calories. If it was, every person who went to a gym would have six pack abs and this is clearly not the case. Some of the factors that need to be looked at include:
Food allergies and intolerances
Digestive health
Processed food intake
Co-ordination and recruitment sequencing of the abdominal wall
Visceral conditions
Intake of medical drugs
Proper training technique
Emotional stress
All these factors add up in the body and need to be addressed to get you to your goals. Now lets look at these in greater detail.

Food allergies and intolerances are one of the biggest reasons why people can’t flatten their abs. Food intolerances are highly likely in society today with the amount of foods that we eat that have not been here in the last 100 years. According to research by BioHealth Diagnostics founder Bill Timmins over 60% of Caucasian people have gluten intolerance. When the food pyramid tells us we should be eating 6-11 servings of cereal grains a day it creates a few problems. Similar figures exist for dairy consumption but the reasons for that are enough to fill another post.

How food intolerances affect our ability to contact our abs is the inflammation they create. When we become allergic or intolerant to a food, when we put it in our mouths our immune system becomes hyper vigilant and creates a ton of inflammation in an attempt to destroy the offending food. This inflammation reduces the ability of the abdominal wall to contract which I will explain in detail later on. We generally become intolerant of a food for 2 main reasons:
Genetic factors
Poor digestion and ‘Leaky Gut syndrome’
The first factor is something that there is not much that we can do about. Leaky gut is a syndrome that is caused by poor lifestyle and poor choices. What happens in a leaky gut is that food particles in the small intestine irritate the lining of the intestinal wall. They affect the micro villi (small hair like projections that look like tentacles) and the mucus covering of the wall, create leaks and get into the bloodstream. food particles are not supposed to be in the blood stream! On another note, that is one of the flaws with the Eat Right for Your Type books. Many of the studies on food lectins ( the substances that cause our problems by causing our blood to clump together) have been done on food added to blood isolated in test tubes. This is not how food gets into our bodies. A person with healthy digestion is completely capable of handling food lectins – although this is a minority of people.

This situation creates some problems for us as we try to flatten our abs. One of the things the body does when an organ is under stress is cause pain and dysfunction is inhibit or communicate through the musculoskeletal system. This is called a viscerosomatic reflex. This is not a radical concept. For many years we have known that one of the impending signs of a heart attack is pain radiating down the left arm to the little finger. Many women get back pain every month that coincides with their cycle. It is not an unknown subject but is neglected by therapists, doctors and trainers when it comes to training programs and rehabilitation.

Beal has described the phenomenon of viscera-somatic reflexes as resulting from afferent stimuli, arising from a dysfunction of a visceral nature. An afferent nerve is a nerve that carries impulses towards the spinal cord from an organ or muscle. The reflex is in initiated by afferent receptors, which are then transmitted to the Dorsal horn of the spinal cord, where they synapse with interconnecting neurons. The stimuli are then converted to sympathetic and motor afferents and result in measurable changes in skeletal muscle, skin and blood vessels.
Abnormal stimulation or dysfunction, which is often caused by dietary choices can result in the following symptoms:
Hyperaesthesia of the skin
Vasomotor, pilomotor and sudomotor changes
Reflex rigidity of the somatic musculature
Sensory motor amnesia and the inability to voluntarily and involuntarily recruit the muscle
Sensory motor amnesia was first identified by Thomas Hanna, the creator of the Somatics school of neuromuscular retraining. It is the inability to recruit muscles in the correct patterns required for normal function. This can really affect your abdominal training efforts! An example of this is inflammation in the stomach. This can be caused by alcohol, non-steroidal anti inflammatory drugs or simply stress. The stomach receives its sympathetic innervation (the same part of the nervous system that innervates the muscles) from the 5th to the 9th Thoracic Vertebrae. The external oblique, internal oblique, rectus abdominis and the Transversus Abdominis are all innervated by Anterior Primary Rami of T7-T12. This means a stress on the stomach will affect all abdominal muscle recruitment patterns! What happens concomitantly with this loss of abdominal recruitment is the spinal muscles become reflexively rigid. This loss of stabilization with extra torque can very often cause low back pain.

This illustrates to us the importance of a proper diet for flat abdominals. It becomes more complicated when you look at immediate onset of food allergy and delayed onset food allergies. An immediate onset is usually obvious. A reaction to peanuts, where a person can go into anaphylactic shick and die is an immediate onset reaction. The second kind, which is far more common, is a delayed onset food allergy. These allergies are not immediately traceable and can cause reactions in the body for as long as the food remains in the body. When it is totally eliminated the problems will stop. Unfortunately, due to modern dietary choices our transit times have been greatly lengthened. Transit time is simply put the time from which a food enters the mouth until it exits the anus. Dr Dennis Burkitt discovered while looking at native Africans that their average transit time was 12 hours. A good transit time should be between 12 and 24 hours. Many people have a transit time of 56 hours, about what you would have if you have three bowel movements a week. This is not good from a health perspective as well.

Improper co-ordination and sequencing of the muscles involved creates problems as well. The abdominal musculature is a unique system with the muscles having nine sources of innervation. Most muscles have 2 sources, a primary and a secondary. This illustrates how complex this system is. Optimal recruitment patterns are needed for proper aesthetic appeal and proper function. Much research has been done linking low back pain to an inability to sequence proper abdominal sequencing. This is not a question of one muscle not being strong enough. It is a neurological issue meaning it is due to the nervous system. As i have illustrated above, we can clearly see that what we ingest affects the ability of our nervous system to recruit the right muscles.

Training the abdominals should then progress in a linear, hierarchal fashion. The process should be:
Isolation of the muscles that are dysfunctional.
Integration of these muscles into full body movement. This sequence could go -
Static Core – Static Extremity
Static Core – Dynamic Extremity
Dynamic Core – Static Extremity
Dynamic Core – Dynamic Extremity
The goal should be to integrate correct function of the abdominal wall into everyday life and movement patterns. To help with all this professional help is needed. If this interests you please look at the practitioners listed or contact me and I will put you in touch with one in your area.

Incorrect exercise choice also limits Abdominal development. Two examples of this is the crunch and lying leg raise. I will break these two common exercises down for you and offer up some better alternatives.

The crunch is an exercise that does not look at many things in regards to function but also aesthetics. The first problem with the crunch is that it is performed on the floor. Doing the exercise on the floor limits your range of motion significantly. The human spine has the ability to both flex and extend. The crunch on the floor puts you into a position of forward flexion. This then has further ramifications. When doing the exercise you are working in a shortened range of motion. It is like doing half a biceps curl. What will happen is you will get stronger in this shortened state is you adapt. Your muscles get shorter. When a muscle gets shorter it drops sarcomeres. Sarcomeres are functional units of muscle fibers. When this happens consistently these sarcomeres cannot be regained It is estimated you can only ever regain back 80% of your lost sarcomeres.

This flexed position which you are now stuck in affects your breathing. Your rib cage is immobilized which will force you to breathe through your mouth to get a full breath. This leads to further rigidity of the rib cage and thoracic spine. This flexion in the spine then affects shoulder function. When your thoracic spine is flexed doing a pressing motion vertically is very painful as the shoulder becomes impinged. This then limits the rest of your training and stops you from performing some very beneficial exercises.

The Lying leg raise does wonders for your low back. When you see this exercise performed you will often see the trainee failing to keep their low back pressed against the ground. They will generally have an increased lumbar arch or lumbar lordosis. This means that the main muscle that they are recruiting is not the abdominals but the hip flexors, in particular the psoas. The Psoas is a powerful muscle that originates on the vertebral bodies and transverse processes of all 5 lumbar vertebra and attaches to the lesser trochanter of the femur. When it gets stronger it pulls the lumbar spine further into extension, a position that is often associated with increased pain. It is often doe at high speeds with an unstable spine putting massive loads through the lower back.

Two exercises that helps fix these problems are the swiss ball crunch and the swiss ball prone jack knife. Doing a crunch on a swiss ball helps restore healthy range of motion to the thoracic spine and the swiss ball jack knife helps maintain a neutral posture in the lumbar spine while training the abdominals and the hip flexors to work together.

The last issue i would like to talk about is emotional stress. Emotional stress can be the downfall of every good intentioned exercise program. In the field of work I do, Sports Kinesiology each different emotion affects a muscle, an organ and a gland. This is known as the muscle/meridian/organ/gland matrix. This basically means that an issue in one part of the body will compromise the function of the body in many others. This is because the body seeks to disperse stress over as many systems as possible. This allows all systems to function rather than having the total shut down of one system. To describe these connections takes a 2 year diploma to understand but the important thing to take away is that your emotional health affects your performance and can undo all your attempts to train your abdominals.

These are some of the reasons why training the abdominals is such a complicated task. Simple exercise is not the solution. An integrated and holistic approach is required to really get to the ‘core’ issues. I hope this has helped you in your quest for optimal health

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