HARD Core Performance

If there is one topic in the realm of strength and fitness that receives the most attention due to an overabundance of conflicting information and myths – it’s the abdominals. Everywhere you look there is some fitness guru claiming to have the “secret” to rock hard abdominals. Every gym that you visit is teaming with “functional training” equipment such as oversized beach balls and wobble boards designed to train the core. Every magazine on the news rack shouts that it contains a brand new and exciting routine for constructing a 6-six pack or a chiseled midsection.

With all of this information available to the average gym-goer you’d think that more guys would have a better set of abs than that geek from Saved By The Bell who now gobbles on all of the women’s talk shows, in the middle of the afternoon when most real men are at work.

Is all of this conflicting information necessary? Does all of this ab-blasting and crunching have any impact on the appearance of your abs and, significantly more important – the strength and function of your core? In my search for the answers to these questions I looked to where I typically find the real essence of human performance and potential – Primal Man, the raw, and untainted version of you and I.

I am under that impression that primal man had an awesome set of abs. It’s hard for me to imagine that being subjected to the environmental pressures of prehistoric Earth would yield primal man a set of love handles and protruding abdomen. It is also difficult for me to imagine him banging out a few sets of crunches in order to maintain a sexy midsection for primal babes to gawk at.

To consider that the abdominals are nothing more than a canvas for us to construct a sexually stimulating mural would be analogous to saying that the sun is only a source of light. This is ridiculous! The sun provides warmth, nutrients and life to everything that we know in existence. In the same light, consider that your abdominals are several times more complex and significant than just a 6-pack.

The Abdominal Brain

Your abs have got a lot of nerve! Yep, these muscles have over 4 times the amount of nerve innervations from the spinal chord than any other muscle group in your entire body. Most muscles only have two sources of nerve innervations, one primary and one secondary. But your “nervy” abdominals have nine innervations from every segment of your spinal chord from T5 all the way to L1!

This is pretty important information considering that each one of these nerve innervations receives specific messages sent from The Master (your brain) through the spinal chord directly into the muscle. This basically means that your abs have nine distinct brains!
Why would a group of muscles designed to just look good and perform crunches have nine brains?
The reason why the abdominals have physical evolved to contain such an abundant sum of nerve innervations is due to the enormous amount of responsibility placed on this muscle group. The abdominal wall stabilizes joints, supports your organs, supports breathing, supports that circulatory/immune system, as well as the digestion/elimination system.

It the purpose of this article to show you how to train your abdominals in the manner that was intended by our Creator. I will make it blatantly obvious that with the exception of specific rehabilitative attempts to isolate weak upper abdominal muscles, base-conditioning programs focusing specifically on hypertrophy of the abdominal wall, or aesthetics, crunches, sit-ups and similar isolation tactics are relatively useless for improving abdominal function and athletic performance!

Primal-Survival Abs

We are primal men living in a modern world. Although controversial, it has been established by several scientists that it takes over 100,000 years for .001% of a genome to change. What this means is that for all intents and purposes, yourself and primal man are physically the same. The bodies that roamed this planet hunting for food and building shelter with nothing more than stones and sticks is an exact replica of the pile of flesh that we use to stare at computer monitors and thumb through television channels today.

During the majority of the past 100,000 years, man survived as nomadic hunters and gatherers, sustaining life on available meats and plant life. Scientific evidence also exists that supposes that man had established a preferential taste for animal meats as far back as 2.3 million BC. Meat as a source of nutrition was and still is superior to plant life due to increased nutrient density. Two pounds of deer meat, for example, contains six times the amount of calories as the same weight in veggies.

One of the biggest differences between the foraging of veggies and berries and the hunting of meat is that, meat moves! To get his hands on the delicious and nutritious meat of buffalo, deer or kangaroo, primal man had to perform such feats of strength as throwing stones, tossing spears and, wielding clubs. It takes a tremendous amount of effort from the deep abdominal wall to stabilize joints and requires the powerful expression of strength from the outer unit abdominal musculature to accelerate spears and swing clubs.

Lets imagine that we are a hungry primal man squatting behind a bush as we wait for the perfect opportunity to accelerate a spear into the chest cavity of an approaching deer. As the unsuspecting deer comes nearer to our bush in order to nibble on some berries, we sneak out from behind the bush and forcefully thrust our sharpened spear into our juicy meal.

Within this story is the secret explanation as to how the abdominal muscles work and how we can best train them for maximum performance.

When thrusting the spear, the musculature of the oblique system coordinate efforts with the action of the lead leg, torso, and opposite shoulder and arm. This is important to note because in most functional activities there are necessary requirements for the same degree of synergy. Weather you are battling an offensive lineman in football, throwing a baseball, wrestling an opponent, or walking your hyper active Great Dane your abdominal muscles are required to coordinate efforts with several other systems and muscle groups. It is very rare that the abs will work alone.

Let’s again consider primal man and his journey for sustenance. Once he has successfully killed his prey he now has the arduous task of getting it home to feast on with his primal buddies. This most likely required that he drag the carcass a considerable distance or find a way to get it on his back to carry. If this didn’t work, he may have to cut it into pieces, quite a task to complete with only a sharp rock and his teeth.

Pulling the carcass would require that his lats, rear shoulders and low back provide the majority of pulling force. Because it is typical to pull more with one side of the body over the other, it is likely that there was considerable rotational torque placed on the core. Along with the efforts of the pulling muscles, the abdominals would provide a significant amount of rotational force as well as acting as stabilizers to the prime movers.

During his trek through rough terrain carrying a heavy load, the primal hunter would have encountered numerous obstacles including large rocks and logs, high grass, potential thieves, and predators. Traversing across these objects and obstacles required the hunter to lunge, push, pull, squat, crawl, twist and bend – all of which require a significant contribution from the lower, upper and side abdominal muscles. This constitutes real abdominal training!

Aside from feeding and protecting his tribe, primal man had to build shelter, which required significant physical effort in the form of “functional exercises”. Lifting, pushing and pulling heavy stones and logs would surely require massive physical support from the abdominals and core muscles.

Core Performance For Men & Athletes

Abdominal condition which integrates human movement patterns such as squatting, lunging, twisting, pushing and pulling is superior to floor based, crunch-type exercises for increasing athletic strength and performance. It is these types of movements that provide you with a 6-pack that works!

Exercises that improve core stability and abdominal strength in this truly functional manner include the Single Arm Push, Single Arm Pull and Wood Chop movements pictured below. Also, when performed properly, all other “Primal Pattern” exercises like Front Squatting, Dead Lifting, and Barbell Presses will elicit a significant demand on the core muscles while reinforcing sound motor skills and movement efficiency.

SINGLE ARM PULL

SINGLE ARM PUSH

WOOD CHOP

Isolation exercises for the abdominals do serve their purpose of making you a better cruncher. They may also serve to strengthen the abs in the absence of supporting muscles. But as for increasing athletic prowess, functional strength and agility, it is essential that you include core-conditioning exercises that place a similar demand on the nervous and muscular system as the movement that you intent to improve.

The ultimate goal of core conditioning any exercise, aside from the benefit of improved strength, is to develop athleticism. This is the ability to produce movements with optimal form and at real-time speeds without having to think about it. After all, if you have to think about how you are moving, your brain will not be free to concentrate on how to win the game!