Superior Abdominal Training with the Dead Bug Progression

A human's "core" is typically referring to everything that connects one's upper body to their lower body and there are many muscles that make up one's core musculature. The picture to the right shows the anterior core musculature, which usually receives most of the focus when it comes to training.

Core training has come a long ways in the past 20 years and most people have figured out that doing 100 sit ups a day on the ground isn't the best for your spinal health or performance. Training the Rectus Abdominis is the most popular because this is the "6 pack" muscle and everyone wants to look good. However, the purpose of this blog is to discuss a very important and often neglected postural muscle, the Transverse Abdominis.

The Transverse Abdominis, as shown below, wraps horizontally around ones side. It is an important postural muscle and training it can help stabilize the torso and reduce low back pain. I train the Transverse Abdominis with my athletes primarily to help them become more efficient runners. While we run we have to stabilize our torso as our limbs oscillate and produce force. An unstable torso will result in unwanted movement, decreased force production, and a less efficient runner.

The dead bug exercise is one of my favorite ways to train the Transverse Abdominis and the video below demonstrates how to perform it correctly and it also gives some progressions I have created for it. If you master these progressions, than go back to performing them with body weight and slow things down. Perform them with slow 5 second eccentric and concentric phases. Remember that for postural muscles the focus should be muscular endurance and not strength. Hope you like it! Please leave any feedback below in the comments.