Health Library / Training
This content is for education only and is not medical advice. I'm a fitness coach, not a physician. Talk to your doctor before starting any medication, hormone, supplement, or new exercise program, especially if you have a medical condition or take prescriptions.
Two things to clear up before anything useful can be said.
Crunches will not remove the fat over your abdomen. Spot reduction isn't a thing. You cannot select where fat leaves. Training a muscle under a layer of fat gives you a stronger muscle under a layer of fat. The fat is a nutrition, sleep and overall-training question, covered in its own modules.
Your core is not your six-pack. It's the whole cylinder — the deep abdominal wall, the obliques, the muscles along your spine, the diaphragm on top and the pelvic floor underneath. The visible bit at the front is one member of a group.
Once those two are out of the way, the actual job becomes obvious.
Not producing movement. Resisting it.
In real life your trunk's job is to stay solid while your arms and legs do things. Carrying shopping in one hand. Lifting a case into an overhead bin. Standing up with a grandchild on one hip. Catching yourself on an uneven step.
Every one of those is your trunk refusing to bend, twist or collapse while force goes through it.
Which is why endless crunches transfer so poorly. Crunching trains the trunk to produce repeated flexion — a movement you rarely need, in the position your spine likes least under load.
Anti-extension — stopping your lower back arching when load pulls it that way. Planks done properly, dead bugs, and the overhead position generally.
Anti-lateral-flexion — stopping your torso tipping sideways. Side planks, and the suitcase carry: one heavy weight in one hand, walk, stay upright. That one movement is worth more than most ab routines and almost nobody does it.
Anti-rotation — resisting twist. Pallof presses, any push or pull done one side at a time.
Bracing under real load — learning to make the cylinder rigid while you lift something heavy. This is what squats, deadlifts and carries already teach, which is why people who lift properly often have strong cores without a dedicated routine.
Bracing is not sucking your stomach in, and it's not holding your breath and bearing down as hard as you can.
You want pressure managed around the cylinder, not driven downward. Down is where the pelvic floor is, and repeatedly forcing pressure there for years is one contributor to the problems in the pelvic floor module.
Practically: breathe out through the hard part of the rep on moderate loads rather than straining against a closed throat. On genuinely heavy efforts some breath-holding is normal and appropriate — that's the Valsalva discussed in the blood pressure module, and it's the reason uncontrolled blood pressure changes the calculation.
Ten minutes, twice a week, appended to sessions you already do. A carry, an anti-rotation press, a side plank, a dead bug. Progress them like anything else — heavier, longer, harder leverage.
If you lift properly, that plus your main lifts covers it.
Some things make loaded core work a medical question rather than a training one:
A bulge that appears when you strain, cough or lift — that needs looking at before you load it. Hernias don't resolve with exercise.
Abdominal separation after pregnancy, even decades ago. It's common, it's manageable, and the right progression differs from the general one.
Recent abdominal or hernia surgery.
Pelvic floor symptoms — leaking, heaviness, pain. Read that module; heavy bracing can make an unaddressed pelvic floor worse.
Uncontrolled blood pressure, for the breath-holding reason.
A physical therapist sorts any of those out quickly, and the answer is nearly always "yes, train it, here's the order" rather than "don't."
You're not training your core to look a certain way. You're training it so that at 75 you can carry a bag up stairs, twist to look behind you reversing the car, and catch yourself when the kerb is higher than you thought.
That's the transfer. Crunches don't have it.
Last updated September 30, 2026