Every exercise is a "core" exercise

You've heard the term "core training" many times by now. I think it went from "cool, cutting-edge idea" to cliche in record time. You probably know that it's a more sophisticated approach to working your middle body than "ab workouts," which could more accurately be called "bunches of crunches." The "core" includes all the abdominal muscles, along with the muscles in your lower back, hips, pelvis, and upper thighs. The beauty of core training, as a concept, is that it views your body systemically. Rather than creating artificial separations between "abs " and everything else (not to mention the mostly fictitious "upper abs" and "lower abs ") , it starts with the idea that all the muscles involved in moving or protecting your spine and pelvis are united in purpose. Thus, they should be trained as a unit. Core training, as practiced, pulls in elements from many different disciplines: • Yoga, which helps you master balance and stability through your body's most extreme ranges of motion. You can't have any weak links in the movement chain, so by default you work your midbody area and develop its strength and endurance systemically. • Pilates, which started as rehabilitation exercises for injured dancers and put particular emphasis on what we now call the core. (Joseph Pilates, who created the exercise system, called it the "powerhouse. ") • Physical therapy, from which we got the idea of using Swiss balls for targeted exercises. (They're also called stability, balance, or physioballs.) • Strength and conditioning, which provided the idea of using resistance on twisting exercises, including the ones that Alwyn uses in this program. • Research into back pain and spine injuries. McGill has developed and promoted the idea that it's the endurance of the midbody muscles, rather than their strength or flexibility, that helps prevent back pain. You've probably done plank exercises (if you haven't, you'll do them in Alwyn's workouts) , which are a good example of an endurance-building drill. Notice what's missing? Bodybuilding! The modern concept of core training either mmimizes or eliminates the idea of building a visible six-pack by doing endless series of crunches. Magazine articles still throw a token crunch variation into their core workouts, but it's hard to fault them for clinging to one ghost of workouts past. So I don't have any dispute with core training, based on the aforementioned disciplines. My only problem is that the concept doesn't go far enough. DREAD NECK In the spring of 2006, I heard Bill Hartman lecture at a fitness summit. Bill is a physical therapist and athletic trainer, and consistently ahead of the curve, implementing new ideas years before others in his field have caught on. This time, Bill told us about the concept of "anatomy trains." Roughly speaking, the idea is that your body has a single system of connective tissues that link everything, from head to toe. We're talking about three kinds of connective tissues: • Ligaments, which connect bones to other bones; • Tendons, which connect muscles to bones or to other connective tissues; • Fascia, which are sheets of tissue that cover muscle bellies and sometimes separate different parts of muscles. The segments of the rectus abdominis, for example, are created by thick bands of fascia, giving the muscle its distinctive resemblance to ice cubes in a tray. That's the "anatomy" part. "Trains " are the pathways of muscular action that are linked by these connective tissues. And that's where it gets interesting. In the illustration on this page, you see the rectus abdominis is in the middle of a pathway that starts at the toes, runs up the shins and the quadriceps (the big muscles on the front of your thighs) , through the rectus abdominis and the fascia covering your sternum (your breastbone) . The path splits as it goes up the sides of your neck, and reconnects on the back of your skull, forming a loop. This made intuitive sense to me when Bill said it, because it supported an observation I made a few years back while looking at a drawing in an anatomy book. I noticed that the bottom parts of the pectoral muscles-the chest, or "pees " -were directly connected to the upper parts of the rectus abdominis by a sheath of fascia. You'll never hear a bodybuilder suggest that there 's a functional connection between the pees and the abs-they're two entirely different body parts !-but there it was in that anatomy book, clear as could be. On the back of your body, the line starts on the bottom of your feet, goes up your calves and hamstrings and spinal erectors, and terminates on the front of your skull, on the ridge of your eyebrows. Your body also has lines that cross your torso diagonally, as shown on the next page. The one that starts on the inside of your left foot and ankle weaves its way to the outside of your left hip, then crosses the front of your torso (this is why the muscles of your obliques have fibers that go diagonally) , wraps behind it, crosses again in your upper back, and ends up on the left-hand side of the base of your skull.These are all total-body workouts, which means you'll work all your major muscles every time you're in the gym. (And by "gym," I mean wherever you lift. You should be able to do these workouts at home with slight adjustments, which I'll show in the exercise descriptions in Chapter 11.) That's why you want to take a full day off between each workout, with no more than three workouts in any seven-day period. You're welcome to do something active on the days in between your weight workouts. You'll see suggestions and parameters in Chapter 12, "Extra Stuff to Do. " For now, I'll just say that your goal in a lifting program is to get the benefits of lifting. Doing extra resistance exercise in between these workouts is counterproductive. Doing intervals, or even some modest endurance exercise, could be beneficial. But it could just as easily interfere with your recovery from the weight workouts. Or you could experience anything in between. There are no rules that apply to every woman, so you have to rely on knowledge of your body and exercise history, along with trial and error, to figure out how much nonlifting activity-if you choose to do any at allworks best for you. RECOVERY This is a big topic, since it's really about three different issues: Recovery between sets and exercises This is the amount of time you take between each set of each exercise. Alwyn is precise about this, and it's designated in the workout charts you'll see later in this chapter. Rest periods are usually 30, 60, or 90 seconds. Most of the time, you'll rest 30 seconds after high-repetition sets (more than 12 reps per set) , 60 seconds after moderate repetitions (8 to 1 2), and 90 seconds after low-rep sets (6 or fewer) . The charts will always tell you what amount of rest Alwyn has in mind. One question we hear a lot: "What happens if I take less time between sets, so I can get out of the gym faster?" Alwyn's standard response is that it's up to you, of course. But you have to understand you' re changing the workout if you change the rest intervals. It's still a workout, and it might be a very good workout, but it's different from the one Alwyn designed. Recovery between workouts I mentioned this briefly in the previous section. You always want to give your muscles forty-eight hours to recover before you work them again. That's because, as I 've mentioned elsewhere, serious strength training creates micro trauma-tiny tears and strains in your muscles and connective tissues. Your body responds to this minor damage by making your muscles bigger and stronger, thus protecting them against future damage. (That protection mechanism explains why you need to mix up your workouts. Your body's goal is to reach stasis so it can stop making adaptations to the stresses you impose on it. Your goal is to keep imposing new stresses so your body keeps making adaptations.) Some activities help with recovery by promoting blood flow into the muscles. Certainly, yoga could fall into this category. For some people, ajog or swim or bike ride could serve that purpose. But for others, a jog might simply induce more fatigue into the muscles, so you'd be in worse shape the next time you hit the weights. As I said earlier, I can't predict what will or won't help your recovery, except to say that strenuous resistance exercise will never help you recover from strenuous resistance exercise. That's why you need forty-eight hours between workouts. Sometimes an extra day helps, which is why we suggest a limit of three workouts in any seven-day period. Recovery between stages I'd like to make a terrible confession about my own workout programs. This is the third consecutive book in which my coauthor and I have adamantly recommended rest weeks between stages of programs. And I almost never follow this advice. That's because I'm fifty; take two or three vacations a year with my wife and three children; go on several business trips a year; and sometimes take time away from the gym just because the kids are off school and it promotes family harmony if I hang around. It would be harder for me not to take weeks off. And because I have so many weeks and partial weeks in which I can't follow a serious training program-probably eight breaks a year, on average-I don't bother scheduling weeks off in my workout schedule. I get weeks off whether I want them or not. So I want to emphasize that this is the least rigid type of planned recovery. You're free to work with your own schedule, and take a week off earlier or later than the schedule suggests if that works better for you. The only rule is that you should take an occasional week off to give your body a chance to recover fully. I'm talking about more than your muscles: • Connective tissues have a smaller blood supply than your muscles, and take longer to adapt to strenuous exercise. The extra week away from heavy lifting gives them time to catch up. • Your nervous system gets fatigued along with your muscles, tendons, and ligaments. This is something exercise scientists have only recently begun exploring, so there aren't yet firm guidelines. But strength coaches like Alwyn and longtime lifters like me understand that sometimes you have bad days in the gym, even though your muscles have had plenty of time to recover. We often call that "neural fatigue," which is a fancy way of saying the body is willing but the brain has other ideas. • Bones also need time to make adaptations. The strain of lifting causes your body to put down new collagen fibers. Those fibers eventually harden into functional bone tissue. It's a months-long process, so by design the adaptation of your bones to heavy lifting lags behind the recovery of your connective tissues, which itself lags behind the recovery of your muscles. And the recovery of your nervous system is a wild card. The best insurance that everything recovers and rebuilds itself is to take a week off from time to time. ALTERNATING SETS When you look at the workout charts, you'll notice that each exercise has a letter preceding it. The first exercise is labeled either A or A 1. Most of the time, the second exercise is B 1, followed by B2. (Sometimes there 's also a B3 or even a B4.) This is the most potentially confusing part of the workout system, and I'm going to explain it as carefully as I can. (In other words, if you already understand why exercises are labeled this way, you'll want to skip this section.) If an exercise is presented with simply a letter (A) that means it's a stand-alone exercise, and you do it in "straight sets"-you do the designated sets with the designated amount of rest following each of them. If the exercises have a letter and a number (B I, B2) , then you're going to do them as alternating sets. The technique is simple. You do the first exercise (B I, say) , rest for the designated time, do the second exercise (B2) , rest for the designated time, and repeat until you've done all the required sets of both exercises.