Should You Train Abs Every Day? | Dr. Andy Galpin
In a Nutshell
Core muscles have roughly the same 50/50 fast/slow-twitch fiber mix as the quads, so they do not need daily high-rep work or special recovery rules. High-volume, high-repetition spinal flexion carries some injury risk and should be avoided if back pain is already present, but moderate flexion training is otherwise safe. Train the abs with the same progressive-overload principles you use for other muscles, adjusting only for spinal safety rather than inventing separate “core-only” rules.
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Muscles like your abs that are slow-twitch that are postural, that are on all the time either need more training and or can recover faster so you can train it more frequently. This is the idea that you should train your abs every day or your calves every day or most days. And it's based on the rationale of what I just said as well as things like oh, maybe our core muscles are way more slow-twitch. And other muscles are faster.
The reality of it is and we don't have a lot of data on things like fiber type for our core muscles, but we do have research going you know back to like the early 1990s on autopsy models. So this is when we you know unfortunately folks come in after they passed and we're able to look at that. And you're pretty you're going to be pretty surprised to realize that the vast majority of the muscles in your core are pretty much 50/50 fast-twitch slow-twitch. Which is almost exactly what things like your vastus lateralis in your quad are.
If I started this conversation off by saying, do you think that you should train your core the exact same way you train your quads? You'd be like, no way. And in fact muscle fiber muscle fiber type-wise they're very very similar. And so now we're getting to the second place which is like, okay, well wait a minute. They're they're activated a lot. But they're the same fiber type profile. They have this anticipatory response. And when you look around the research there's actually no literature at all suggesting that the training principles should differ in your abs versus those in your quad.
We've we've already thrown a lot of people's thought process out of whack here. If I were to say do you want to train your quads for growth? Do you want to train your quads because of knee pain or hip pain or do you want to train them because you want to jump higher? You would assume that the training principles differ, right? So when we start to break down the physiology and the characteristics of the individual core muscles themselves, we start to realize that's not a good rationale to train them in this weird way where we do again hundreds of repetitions per day, we do them every day, we think that they respond differently. They are skeletal muscle. They're not a different type of muscle. They're not a different fiber type. They have a slightly different function, but they're not these these all day activated so because of that they have to be trained differently or they recover faster or anything else like that.
There are some unique considerations that do matter to training though. And specifically what I'm referring to here is the spinal health type of stuff. So, unlike your quad where I can load it really heavy and I can really isolate it and smash it and not be too worried about any other tissue getting hurt, we don't have the same freedom with our core. So, I can't have you do for example five sets of one repetition at your one rep core max. I mean, I could probably, but my likelihood of causing an injury or exacerbating an injury in our back or hips is really really high. So, it's not in the fibers or the muscle itself, it's what's associated with that tissue, if what's around it and again I'm specifically referring to your spine here.
There is some evidence and this is controversial, but there is some evidence that high repetition loading with the lumbar spine um during movements like like one can imagine sit-ups and things like that has been linked to elevated risk of injury. You can see those data pretty clearly.
At the same time and I actually was an editor for um a pro-con piece many years ago in uh strength and conditioning journal where people were arguing back and forth about whether or not the crunchy or crunch exercise specifically is safe or not, you'll actually see evidence that it is plenty safe. If done appropriately, if done right, flexion based ab exercises are not necessarily going to guarantee back injury. But if you're coming from a perspective or a population where you're trying to either deal with somebody who has back pain or people that are consistently getting it, I understand why you're super sensitive to that exercise. You Many people in that world do not like it either because they've seen it cause pain or they're thinking there's just other ways I can train those muscle groups. Why run the risk? But at the same time, that's not fair then to throw the exercise out completely and say things like it's going to cause back pain.
Hopefully, that helps you understand a little bit of why that exercise specifically and really what we're talking about is a broader concept of should I train the ab muscles more like my quads and other muscles or should I have entirely different principles? And what I'm generally trying to argue is there are maybe some considerations, but I don't think throwing everything that we've ever known about training out is the appropriate response either because the data just aren't there. It just does not indicate that that is necessary.
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