Strengthen Your Core Without Expanding Your Waistline
Strengthen Your Core Without Expanding Your Waistline
Hi everyone - today I want to share some advice on how to strengthen your abs and lower back without making your waistline larger. The core muscles are incredibly important for your health and wellness and must be very strong to prevent pain and injuries. However, most people also want to keep their midsection small and tight to look better - a large, blocky waist is typically not found very attractive. So here are some tips to make your core super strong without enlarging your stomach.
What Makes Muscles Grow?
Muscles normally grow larger when they are stimulated with a certain threshold of resistance (such as dumbbells, cable machines, or exercise bands) repeatedly. For example, if I do bicep curls with 25 pound dumbbells for 3 sets of 10 reps, my biceps will respond by growing larger and stronger. The next week, I may need to do 4 sets of 10 to provide enough resistance for my biceps to grow again.
Normal Exercise Causes Muscles to Tear and Grow Larger
In addition, muscles typically grow only when they move while exercising. For example, with a normal bicep curl, my bicep muscle get shorter and longer as my arm moves the weight up and down. As the muscle lengthens and stretches, small microtears are created in the muscle fibers. Those tears are then healed and the muscle grows a bit stronger and larger in response to the tears.
Isometric Exercises Strengthen Muscles without Making Them Larger
On the other hand, I can also do a bicep curl by just holding the weight without moving my arm - that is called an isometric contraction. My bicep muscles are working hard to hold my arm in the same place as the dumbbell tries to move my arm downward with the force of gravity. In this scenario, the biceps do not shorten and lengthen; rather, they stay in the same place the entire exercise. Thus, there are no microtears occurring in the muscle fibers. The muscle grows stronger, but it does not grow larger.
Three Keys to Effective Core Training
The first key to strengthen the core without expanding the waistline is by using mostly isometric exercises for the abdominals, obliques, transverse abdominis, and lower back muscles. Here are three great isometric exercises for the core muscles:
Planks
Side Planks
1-arm Farmer Walks
Exercise the Abs Once a Week for Strength without added size
The second key to tighten the core without increasing the waistline is by only working the midsection muscles once or twice a week. For almost any muscle group, you can increase strength and size by working that muscle two or three times a week. Often, training a muscle just once a week is not enough to make it grow. However, once-a-week training is enough to make most muscles stronger. So, by doing just one workout a week for the core, you can strengthen those muscles without expanding your waistline. Most people, and trainers, do the opposite - they train the stomach three or four days per week, sometimes even daily. In some people, though, that frequency and volume for the midsection area can lead to too much hypertrophy, causing the waist measurement to grow.
An Old School Exercise for a Tight, Trim Waistline
The third key for a strong but slim waist is the stomach vacuum exercise. The stomach vacuum is an exercise using the transverse abdominis muscle, or TVA.
Stomach Vacuum Exercise
Bodybuilders from the 'Golden Era' in the 1970s, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, did tons of stomach vacuums to keep a trim midsection, but this simple and effective exercise seems to have been forgotten by many people in the health and fitness industry. So what is a stomach vacuum? Basically, you are just sucking in your midsection as tightly as possible. Sounds simple, but it's actually pretty tough to do properly and to hold for much more than a few seconds when you start. Frank Zane was another bodybuilder in the 1970s and 1980s, like Arnold, who practiced stomach vacuum exercises almost daily and included them in some of his contest posing.
In that picture, Zane is actually drawing his stomach inward and upward as hard as possible. Now, we're obviously not going to look like Frank Zane (and most people don't want to), but we can all benefit from the stomach vacuum exercise.
How to Do a Stomach Vacuum Exercise
Here's how to do it the right way. I encourage everyone to begin with an easy version, lying on the ground on your back:
On the ground, breath in deeply and then exhale as much air as you can
While exhaling, try to draw your belly button downward, toward the ground
As you draw your stomach down toward the ground, try to imagine your stomach becoming smaller and smaller
When you cannot squeeze your stomach inward anymore, try to hold for a few seconds (this will be tough!)
Relax your midsection, breath and rest for 10-20 seconds, then try again
To make this exercise even more effective at reducing your waistline, try to do it on an empty stomach - no food and no liquids.
What Does a Stomach Vacuum Exercise Do?
Now, what is actually happening when you do a stomach vacuum exercise? To draw the belly button inward, you must flex your transverse abdominis muscles, which are basically your ab muscles underneath your ab muscles. The abs that you can see when someone has a 6-pack are the rectus abdominis muscles, and the transverse abdominis are beneath those. So you can't see them directly, but they are very important for several reasons:
First, what we all care about - they help you keep your gut from sticking out! When muscles are weak, they become lazy and flabby. So when the transverse abdominis is weak, guess what becomes lazy and flabby? Your waistline!
Second, they provide stability and protection for your spine. About 80% of American adults will experience lower back pain at some point in their lives, and often times weakness in the transverse abdominis muscles are a factor in the development and continuation of lower back pain and dysfunction.
So there are three keys to strengthen your core without increasing the size of your waistline. By following those ideas, you can enjoy the benefits of a strong, stable torso without making your midsection look blocky.
-Shane