Ask someone what their core workout is and you’ll usually get a list of exercises. Planks, crunches, maybe hanging leg raises if they’re feeling ambitious. Ask them why those exercises and not others, and the answer thins out fast. Most people aren’t training their core. They’re doing core exercises, which is a different thing, and the gap between the two explains why a lot of dedicated ab work produces so little.
A program is a structure. It has categories it needs to cover, a way of getting harder over time, and a reason each piece is in there. Most ab routines have none of that — they’re a pile of movements someone collected from different videos, all of which happen to train the same thing in the same way. You can do that pile three times a week for a year and your core will be almost exactly as strong at the end as it was at the start.
Your core does four jobs, and most routines only train one
The muscles wrapping your trunk aren’t there to bend you forward. That’s one function out of several, and it’s the one nearly every popular ab exercise happens to hit. The other jobs go untrained.
Break it down by what the trunk is actually asked to do. It flexes — crunches, leg raises, anything that shortens the distance between ribs and hips. It resists extension, meaning it stops your lower back from arching when load is pulling it that direction. It resists lateral movement, keeping you upright when weight is hanging off one side. And it resists rotation, holding your ribcage square while your arms or legs move independently.
Four categories. Count how many your current routine covers. If the honest answer is one, you’ve found a large part of why your progress stalled. Anti-rotation work in particular is missing from almost every home ab routine, and it’s the function most directly tied to how your midsection performs under real load — carrying, throwing, pressing overhead, changing direction.
Filling the gaps doesn’t require much. A Pallof press covers anti-rotation. A suitcase carry covers lateral. A dead bug or ab wheel rollout covers anti-extension. Add a loaded flexion movement and you’ve got all four in a session that takes twelve minutes.
The reason your core stopped getting stronger
Core training is where people forget everything they know about building muscle. Nobody expects to grow their chest by doing the same three sets of push-ups for two years. But that’s exactly the relationship most people have with planks — same duration, same position, same stimulus, month after month, and then puzzlement about why nothing changed.
Muscle responds to increasing demand. Your abs did not opt out of that rule. The problem is that the standard progressions people reach for don’t increase demand much. Going from a 60-second plank to a 90-second plank adds endurance, not strength or size. Going from 20 crunches to 40 mostly adds fatigue.
Real progression looks like adding weight to a cable crunch. Moving from a kneeling rollout to a standing one. Extending the lever — arms overhead instead of at your sides changes a dead bug from easy to genuinely difficult without touching the rep count. Slowing the eccentric so the muscle spends more time under tension in a lengthened position.
Pick a metric and move it. Load, leverage, range, or tempo. If none of those numbers changed in the last month, neither did your core.
Breathing is part of the exercise, not a distraction from it
Here’s something most people never get told: the pressure inside your abdomen is what makes your trunk rigid, and you control that pressure with your breath. Take a breath into your belly, brace as though bracing for impact, and your spine becomes measurably more stable. Exhale and relax, and it doesn’t.
This is why two people can hold identical-looking planks and get very different results. One is generating tension through the whole trunk while breathing shallowly against a braced wall of muscle. The other is just waiting out the clock with a sagging midsection and no intra-abdominal pressure at all.
Practice it separately from your workout if you need to. Lie down, hand on your stomach, breathe in so the hand rises rather than your chest. Then, without losing the air, tighten everything as if you were about to take a punch. That sensation is what you’re trying to hold during every rep of every core exercise you do. It also transfers directly to squats and deadlifts, where a braced trunk is the difference between a strong lift and a hurt back.
Frequency matters more than session length
The core recovers quickly. It’s built for sustained low-level work all day, which means it tolerates being trained more often than most muscle groups. Two or three short sessions a week beat one long one, and a lot of people do better with four or five brief blocks tacked onto the end of other workouts.
Ten minutes is enough per session when the ten minutes are structured. Three sets of two exercises, taken close to failure, with load or leverage that makes the last few reps hard. Compare that to the thirty-minute ab burnout videos, which mostly generate soreness and the feeling of having worked, without ever asking the muscle to handle more than it did last time.
One caution about ordering: put core work after your heavy compound lifts, not before. A pre-fatigued trunk makes squats and deadlifts less safe and less productive.
Where the video comes in
Dr. Andy Galpin’s full episode on core and ab training goes deep on the physiology behind all of this — how the different trunk muscles are layered, what the research actually shows about training frequency and volume, and how to assemble the categories above into a weekly plan you can run for months. It’s a long one, closer to a lecture than a workout video.
Worth watching if you want the reasoning behind the programming rather than another exercise list. Galpin is a physiologist who works with professional athletes, and the framework he lays out is the same one he uses with them.
The difference between people who develop a strong, visible midsection and people who don’t usually isn’t effort. It’s whether the effort was pointed at something. Cover the four movement categories, make one variable harder each month, brace properly, and train it a few times a week — then give it enough time to matter.
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