Core Training That Doesn't Suck

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Nov 23

Written By Adam Fisher

Takeaway Points:

Core training, the way most people does it, involves endless repetitions and holding planks for time - a method which is exhausting, boring, and also ineffective.
Good core training revolves around moving into more advanced variations which are more appropriately challenging, and more fun and exciting in the process.
Here, I share some of the variations which I’ve gotten into as a result of my greater focus on bodyweight exercise in the last few months.

My Core Training Mistakes

I’ve had a bit of a weird relationship with core training.

Back when I was first starting out as a lifter, I was obsessed with being like Bruce Lee, and tried to learn everything I could about his training methods to copy him. I knew Bruce Lee did a lot of core training, so I figured I should too, even though it wasn’t really relevant to my training goals.

I got a situp bench and used to use it in front of the tv each day - I would put on a half hour comedy show or something similar, and try to do as many situps as I could in 30 minutes. Eventually, it got to the point where I could do situps more or less constantly during that time, but it was boring and exhausting, and of course I didn’t get sick abs out of the process. Abs don’t generally grow much in size in response to training, so getting visible abs is more about diet and leanness than about training them a ton.

Later on, I would get into other methods of core training, bits and pieces here and there. I added crunches, planks, twists, and other common staples into my training. But my approach was always the exact same as it had been with situps - do as many as I can.

This is the biggest mistake that a lot of people make when getting into bodyweight training methods, because it gets boring very quickly. When your workout is only progressed by adding sets and reps, this means that your workouts slowly and steadily get longer and longer as you have to do more and more of the same thing in order to progress. This is an almost guaranteed recipe for boredom and burnout.

Of course, I didn’t know about any other options, so I went ahead. I would do an entire workout, once a week, that consisted of doing the same boring core exercises over and over. I would try to plank for ten or more minutes at a time, or do hundreds of crunches in a row with minimal range of motion. At one point, I remember deciding to see how many crunches I could perform in a row - ultimately, about forty five minutes later, the answer was “somewhere above 1000”, and I simply got too bored to find the real limit.

The reality is that there are quickly diminishing returns to many common methods of core training, and that above that point, additional practice in the form of adding reps, adding time, or adding sets, isn’t going to get you very much. This is why I’ve written in the past about how core training is a waste of time for a lot of people.

So what’s a better approach?

While lots of people know about common core exercises like twists, crunches, situps, and planks, these methods are all only effective up to a certain point. Once you’re able to do a decent number of reps of these exercises, or once you’re able to hold a plank for a couple minutes at a time, you’re probably not getting much more out of them.

At that point, it’s smarter to move onto more challenging and interesting core exercises, which you should be able to handle if you’ve got a decently strong core. Here are some of the ones I’ve picked up over the years, and find useful both myself and with the clients that I work with.

Advanced Plank Variations

The plank. While the plank is very popular, I also think that it’s often a bit overused. Like I mentioned before, my original method for the plank was simply to try to hold it for as long as I could - a training method which quickly got both boring and exhausting, and led me to hate planks for a long time.

I eventually learned a lot more over the course of years of working as a trainer, and I saw a lot of hate from within the fitness trainer community for the overuse of this exercise. In one very revealing article (which I have since sadly misplaced), a few famous coaches discussed their opinion on the plank exercise. The prevailing opinion was that it’s a wonderful exercise for building a base level of core strength, but that once you can do a plank for more than about 30-60 seconds at a time for a few sets, it tops out on its usefulness and you should look into more advanced variations.

And the plank actually has a lot more variations than I think I ever gave it credit for, back in the day. Once you can do a standard plank, you can play around with adding instability via an unstable surface under the upper or lower body, you can play around with shifting your weight by shuffling the arms or legs back and forth, you can play around with working with only a single arm or leg (or, for more advanced exercisers, only an opposing single arm AND single leg), and you can raise your legs up a bit above the shoulders to increase the challenge a bit as well. You can also add weight balanced on the back (or wear a weight vest) although this is a bit limited because if you’re too aggressive about adding weight it can very quickly encourage bad form.

Because the plank is a very common exercise and easy to do at home with no equipment, I’d say that it can definitely function very well as a lead-in to some of the other exercises explored below. However, doing endless planks is far from ideal, and no matter what the variation, I’d try to keep it to variations which are still challenging within the 10-60 second range. Anything more, and it’s definitely time to move on.

The Dragon Flag

The dragon flag is an exercise in which the exerciser keeps the entire body tight and then, anchored to the ground solely by the shoulders and by holding onto something behind the head, moves the entire body up and down, kind of like a flag flapping in the wind.

While the dragon flag itself is a very challenging exercise, I recommend it as one of the first steps from easier core exercises, because it requires minimal equipment at home and you can easily do non-strict “cheating” or “negative” reps while you get better. Start off with something similar to a standard leg raise, but go all the way up to the initial dragon flag position rather than only moving the legs. On the way down, engage the core to slow the descent of your legs as much as possible. If you can’t do a proper dragon flag rep to get back up, that’s fine, and you can simply do some more leg-raise-all-the-way-up reps.

Keep the number of reps low and just focus on building more control each workout rather than adding more reps. This exercise will absolutely put a lot of stress on the abs without requiring a lot of time, and I find it’s a good starter exercise for a lot of the other more advanced core exercises below.

The Front Lever

The front lever is a gymnastics move in which the exerciser hangs from a bar and then tenses the core and upper back to bring your body into a straight line parallel to the ground, with your eyes facing up towards the ceiling.

This move is definitely more advanced than the dragon flag, and requires that you have a bar to hang from, so it may be a bit harder to master at home. However, the front lever also has easier variations which you can use to ease into it.

First is the tuck front lever. In this version, the legs and knees are bent and tucked in - this greatly reduces the difficulty, and means that even relative beginners can start practicing the movement. Once you can hold that for a decent time, you can try a front lever with one leg forward and one leg tucked, and then you can finally move onto the full front lever. I also find that doing hanging leg raises into the tuck front lever is an excellent exercise which can be done for reps while still being quite challenging, and is a great burnout exercise for the end of a workout.

I find that this movement is a bit intimidating at first, but is definitely easier to get into than you might think.

The L-Sit

The L-sit is an exercise in which the exerciser supports the weight of the body on the hands with the torso upright, keeping the legs out straight in such a way that the body forms an L.

While this exercise can be done from the floor, with the hands flat supporting the weight, I find that this version is a lot harder to get into. If you have a pair of parallette handles at home, these get you a little bit higher off the floor and thus don’t require you to lift the legs as high, making it a bit easier to get into. You can also raise yourself off the floor with the use of a pair of wooden blocks, yoga blocks, or similar, to achieve the same effect.

Once you can hold the L-sit for a while, you can potentially progress into the more challenging V-sit variation. This exercise is also a gateway into some of the other exciting stuff you can do on parallettes, including the planche and handstand.

The Planche

The planche is an exercise in which the exerciser supports the entire weight of their body on their hands from the floor, a bar, or a pair of parallette handles, and then tenses the entire body to keep it straight and parallel to the floor. Essentially, this is kind of the reverse of the front lever.

I find this exercise to be a bit harder to get into than the front lever, personally. Similar to the L-sit, it helps to have blocks or parallette handles to practice on, as this raises you up a bit off the floor and means that you don’t have to push quite as hard to get into a usable position.

Like with the front lever, you can start off with a tucked position, then build into a single leg and then the full variation as you get stronger. If you have a pullup bar and a resistance band, you can also use this to provide a little bit of a boost, making the lift a bit easier. Once you can hold a planche, you can also start learning the planche pushup, an aptly-named mix of the two exercises which is, of course, a very neat trick that a lot of people covet.

The Back Lever

The back lever is similar to the front lever, except that instead of hanging with the torso facing upward, the torso instead faces downward, giving you a sort of “superman flying” feeling and look.

This exercise is not necessarily a ton more challenging, but it does require a level of stability and mobility that is more difficult to achieve. Since you have to hold onto the bar behind your back instead of in front, this means that you have to be comfortable supporting a lot of weight on your arms while they’re pulled very far back - and this requires a lot of stability and mobility in that shoulder joint.

Start off practicing with exercises like skin the cat and german hangs in order to build up that base level of mobility and stability. Once you’ve got that mastered, you can build into the tuck version, straddle version, single leg version, and eventually the full version. Because many of the easier versions essentially require gymnastics rings in order to do, this also means that you’ll probably need to have gymnastics rings at your home or gym in order to get started, and that’s another reason why this exercise may not initially be as useful as some of the other exercises on this list.

Anti-Rotation Exercises

In addition to the standard abdominal core exercises, there are plenty of exercises which target the outer (oblique) muscles of the core. The way a lot of people try to target these muscles is typically with rotational movements - swings, russian twists, and so on. However, while these rotational exercises are important, an often-overlooked aspect of training is the “anti-rotation” exercise - any exercise in which those external muscles are being tensed to resist, rather than cause, rotation of the abdomen.

Some amount of anti-rotation is trained in a lot of other movements. Any single-arm or single-leg exercise will typically involve some amount of uneven load distribution, and will in the process train the external muscles of the core. This includes lunges, single leg deadlifts, split squats, single arm presses, single arm rows, suitcase carries, farmer’s walks, and so on.If you’re not training any of these movements, however, it may often help to do some rotation or anti-rotation exercise in order to develop those muscles, protect against injury, and maximize performance. In many field sports, you often don’t have the ability to move with your legs and arms moving in perfect unison, and so strength and stability in single arm or single leg movements, as well as in the external muscles of the core, can help out quite a lot.

Anti-rotation exercises like cable or banded pallof presses are an example of a good exercise which can be loaded up essentially indefinitely, and so can always be kept challenging. Likewise, I like to use at least one single arm or single leg exercise in many exercise programs so that we can work in a bit of core while still working other muscles in the process, keeping it more exciting.

Wrapping It up

As I’ve said before, for many, doing a lot of core training is a waste of time. Ultimately, this is still true, and most people don’t need to have a particularly well-developed core in order to optimize their health and fitness.

However, if you’re looking to get good at bodyweight exercise (as I and many others have been during lockdown), the core is an absolutely crucial element of mastering many of the cooler and more advanced movements. Some dedicated training for the above exercises is a much easier and more fun way to train the core, without having to do endless reps of the more boring exercises.

To me, that’s a win-win.

About Adam Fisher

Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging for 5+ years, coaching for 6+ years, and lifting for 12+ years. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.

During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around powerlifting and bodybuilding.

Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cat or feeding his video game addiction.

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