The abdominals are one of the most emotionally driven muscle groups in physique enhancement. Perhaps not as high up on the value list as say arms for males or currently the gluts for women, but they have been a mainstay for a long time.

There are a few questions about this, including is the focus producing the full potential of the abdominals? If it was, because of their relatively high standing in the emotional stakes, then the outcomes should mean there are very few shortcoming existing.

I suggest that is not the case. However, I respect that my ‘take’ on abs may be different than yours, and definitely different to the mainstream interpretation.

Here’s ten reasons why I have little confidence that what you are doing with your abdominal training will meet my definition of ‘Awesome Abs’:

1. Your ab picture is small (Purpose)
2. Your values are upside down (Visual)
3. Your ab work is not contributing to the battle (Injury prevention)
4. Your transfer to sport and or life is not effective (Transfer)
5. You didn’t take the class (Prioritization)
6. You do abs last (Sequence)
7. You do too few ab exercises (Volume)
8. Your ab view is too narrow (Lines of movement)
9. You’re too scared to be / do differently (Conformity)
10. You’re sucked into the conspiracy (Commerce)

 

1. Your ab picture is small (Purpose)

I’ve said above that abdominals are a highly emotional muscle group in physical enhancement training. However, that is predominantly for one purpose only – aesthetics. The visual appeal of ‘ripped/shredded’ abs, affectionally referred to as a ‘six pack’. And no longer the exclusive domain of males.

That’s cute. But it’s a small picture.  If you consider my alternative picture on what the abs offer, you are focusing on 33% or 1/3^rd of the ab offering and leaving the remaining 2/3rds on the table.

Here’s my ‘bigger picture’ of the abs, one that I have been sharing for over quarter of a century:

There are a number of reasons why you may or should be doing abdominal exercises and they include:

• Abdominal training and visual impact
• Abdominal training and transfer to sport and or life
• Abdominal training and injury prevention [1] [2] [3] [4]

Perhaps now you can see why I suggest that if not you, the majority have a very small picture view on their abdominal training influences.

2. Your values are upside down (Visual)

To continue with this discussion, even if you were to suggest that your training embraced this bigger picture, I would challenge you on your values. Which of these purposes do you hold in the highest regard and which do you place at the bottom of your focus?

I suggest that an objective analysis of your abdominal training values, as demonstrated by your exercise choices, may be different to mine.

One of us is upside down…

As you will learn in this book there are a number of purposes or benefits from doing what I refer to abdominal training including visual, transfer to life and or sport (function) and injury prevention.  As you may have picked up on by now, I actually have a reverse perspective on the relative value of these three purposes or benefits – injury prevention, transfer and visual.[5]

Make no mistake – your values will drive your program design, and in turn the training results you get.

3. Your ab work is not contributing to the battle (Injury prevention)

When I’m talking about the injury prevention role of abdominals, one of those key tasks is to contribute to a force couple with the abdominals to posteriorly rotate the pelvis (stand the pelvis up). [6]

I’m going to ask her to suck her stomach thin and to squeeze her cheeks. Why do I want to do that?  Well, I want to, they’re the two force couples and we’ll change the shape of her pelvis…She’s got a lack of awareness posturally. She hasn’t got a lot of support. And I’ve only just looked at one half of the force couple. [7]

What are the force couples for posterior rotation of the pelvis? …Glutes and abs…Versus what? Quads and hip flexors, generally speaking…[8]

I call this ‘the battle’: [9]

What is it, the force couple? Hip flexors, quads, pulling the pelvis forward, glutes not strong enough to hold it back, abdominals not contributing to hold it back. The hip flexors and quads are winning the battle. [10]

And the challenge for you, the way I suspect you are doing abdominal training, you are losing the battle:

Why is it pulling forward? What’s winning the battle? … The hip flexors and quads are winning the battle. [11]

This pattern results in the hip flexors winning the battle against the abs and glutes, consequently pulling the top of the pelvis forward and resulting in a pinching of the nerves feeding the lower body. Why? Because the quads/hip flexors get a better training effect. [12]

4. Your transfer to sport and or life is not effective (Transfer)

The third purpose for abdominal training I identify is transfer.  And yes, everyone talks about – but if I was to literally interpret what the world is doing, I am going to assume that the so called ‘plank’ is the exercise that has been crowned as being the exercise with the greatest transfer. Now I don’t, because I do not believe that is the reason this exercise is arguably the most commonly used abdominal exercise in the world these days, taking over from the pre-2000’s garden variety ‘sit-up’. Call me cynical, but I suspect that the plank is chosen because it’s perceived as easy to teach and creates a painful muscle fatiguing outcome in the clients who have been conditioned to believe that muscle fatigue means a satisfactory training effect is occurring.

But if I did literally interpret the omnipresent ‘plank’, humans must live and play sport with rigor mortis….

5. You didn’t take the class (Prioritization)

Since the 1990s, I’ve been providing a concise ‘prioritization of strength training’ lesson.

Prioritization of muscle group

i. By sequence:

a. Within the workout.

b. Within the training week.

ii. By volume.

iii. By load:

a. Load potential.

b. Percentage of maximum load. [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19]

I may be off point here, but if you are doing what everyone else is doing with your abdominal training, I am going to conclude you didn’t take the class – Prioritization in Strength Training 101!  Because they are simply not congruent!

6. You do abs last (Sequence)

If most or all the time you do abs last in your strength workout, you are being compliant. Compliant with what most do.

The continuing dominant paradigm is that abdominals should be done last.  What if they are the weakest body part?  That doesn’t seem to matter!  What if they are the number one training focus for performance?  Again, it doesn’t seem to matter – they are placed last.  Why?  The repetitive answer I get to this is ‘because they cause fatigue of stabilizers and it would be dangerous to do things like squats after doing abdominals’.  Where is the evidence?  Is this evidence from empirical observations or ‘scientific’ research?  Again, that doesn’t seem to matter.  NOBODY does abdominals first!  What a load of trash!  The excuses support the paradigm, nothing more.  I train abdominals first when they are the priority for whatever reason and only put them to the end of the workout when I don’t want to totally avoid any possibility of total body fatigue prior to a maximal strength workout.  That is, I wouldn’t want the total body fatigue draining the neuromuscular system, reducing the potential for load.  But nothing to do with injury potential! [20]

But not compliant with what I concluded in the 1980s and shared repetitively in print from the 1990s onwards. [21]

Some key things I do (and perhaps a little different to what you may be used to!) is I spend a substantial amount of program time doing abdomen at the START OF THE WORKOUT.  Yes, that’s right, before any other exercises.  I know what you are going to say – how many times have I heard it?  Your granddaddy told your daddy and he told you – doing abs first will cause fatigue in the support muscles, which is evil blah blah.  Before you reel out the rhetoric give it a go.  Absolutely bash your abdominals and then squat – then come to your own conclusions.  It’s okay to have a different opinion to the rest of the well-trained monkeys! [22]

So, if you are doing what everyone else is doing – doing abs last most or all of the time – you are not going to achieve what I believe is the potential of your abdominals.

7. You do too few ab exercises (Volume)

Most do one or two sets of abdominal exercises per workout and believe that’s sufficient. That might be in point some of the time, or for those who say only doing a total of one or two sets of lower or upper body per workout. And that’s rare.

Most do two to six (2-6) exercises and four to twelve (4-12) sets per muscle group. But not on the abs.

Bill Pearl’s  classic Keys to the Inner Universe lists and graphically illustrates over 100 ab and trunk exercises! Despite all this info, there seems to be a gap in the knowledge and the actual practice. I still see exercise programs that select only one abdominal exercise, usually a trunk flexion movement. Would you use only one exercise to train your legs or your chest? [23]

How do you explain that?

The only way you can is on the basis you believe the abs don’t deserve equality in volume to other muscle groups.

And that’s another reason you are not going to experience ‘Awesome Abs’, not at least by my definition.

8. Your ab view is too narrow (Lines of movement)

Prior to the release of the Lines of Movement concept in the 1990s, the world viewed ‘legs’ as just that – legs.  All leg exercises were grouped together. Don’t believe me? You obviously weren’t doing leg exercises pre-2000 if you don’t!  In his classic book ‘classic Keys to the Inner Universe’[24] the legs were just that. A category that included squat and squat variations, along with deadlifting and deadlift variations.

This is not a criticism of Bill’s work. He was just reflecting the thinking of the time.  And so was everyone else. Up until at least, the late 1990s when I began to speak more openly about ‘Family Trees’ and ‘Lines of Movement’ in strength training.

That’s a concept I’m sure you’ll have never heard before because this is the first time I have spoken about it. [25]

The challenge with a broad grouping list is that it’s easy to miss appropriate balancing where there is the need to recognize the differences in specific muscle group actions within the muscle group.

Which is why I separated ‘Hip dominant’ from ‘Quad dominant’.

After many years I have decided that there are two family trees in lower body exercises – one where the quad dominates, and one where the hip dominates. [26]

And you are probably making this mistake by assuming and treating the ‘abdominals’ (or worse still, the ‘core’) as one. They are not.

I divide the abdominal muscle groups or functions down into six (6).  The technical correctness of my divisions I will leave to those with the time and motivation to debate to do so.  This is a simple and effective approach to ensuring exposure to all abdominal and some of the other trunk stabilizers…[27]

I provided the ‘Abdominal Lines of Movement’ over a quarter of a century ago, yet most chose not to ‘take that class!’. If you are choosing to ignore some or most of these abdominal ‘Lines of Movement’ – and most are – you’d better have a very good reason for it – other than ignorance…

9. You’re too scared to be / do differently (Conformity)

As I mentioned above, you are most likely doing abdominals the way everyone else is. And that’s fine. It’s just not optimal.

I resonate with the American existential psychologist and author Rollo May’s treatise on conformity:

The opposite of courage isn’t cowardice; it’s conformity.[28]

It may be harsh, but I am willing to challenge you – one of the main reasons you are doing what you are doing in relation to your abdominal training is that you would prefer to conform. And that’s a choice.

You could break the mold. But it would mean being different, and I understand not too many of you are ready to be different.  Conformity is much more comfortable… Most humans chose to live a life less courageous, more ordinary. So, you are ‘normal’ by choosing the same.[29]

It’s just a choice worth reflecting on.

Including once you have considered my thoughts about the drivers of the trends you are conforming to.

10. You’re sucked into the conspiracy (Commerce)

When I first started writing about a possible ‘conspiracy’ in training back in the late 1990s, I didn’t feel totally comfortable because back then anyone talking conspiracy was considered somewhat of a ‘nutter’, at risk of not being taken seriously. Fast forward to the 2020s, and everyone has a conspiracy theory they want to share. So, rest assured, this talk is not a new post-Covid trend compliant behaviour. I’ve been singing from this song-sheet for a bit longer than that…[30]

So, your approach to abdominal training is compliant with the majority, or the dominant trend.  For those interested in unpacking this, how is a trend shaped?  I have for a number of decades shared my beliefs on what are the influences that shape trends in strength training. [31]

Trends I suggest are commercially driven. So, they are not there because they are optimal, they are not dominating because they are in the best interests of the end user – they dominate because people with adequate financial resources have driven the paradigm for their commercial benefit. [32]

For me the number one driver of behavior in our industry are those with vested interests.  The product/equipment manufacturers and distributors are great examples of this…

In the early years of my coaching career, I was where many of you are probably now, believing that to study and learn from ‘trends in training’ was wise.  It didn’t take me long to revise my perspective substantially since then. Throughout the 1990s I warned of the dangers of following trends. In my 2002 second edition of my 1997 book Winning and Losing I dedicated an entire chapter to this topic, titled ‘Don’t Get Sucked in by the Trends!’ [33]

To cut to the point – the risk abdominal training trends face is that too many can be done without equipment. And this is a problem…

Did you know the next craze to come out in this industry is this? It takes 15 minutes a day, six days a week, and involves no equipment. It’s going to be the next really big fad. There’ll be no equipment, and it will take up a time. What are my chances? None whatsoever. Because of why? There’s no equipment. Can’t sell it. No one’s going to make any money off it. And it doesn’t meet the needs of instant gratification. There are two criteria. The only stuff that you get exposed to in this country is stuff that people can make money off, and it’s convenient. And your entire professional thinking is based on those two things. You are completely bound on the variables of because someone decided they could commercialize it and make a profit margin from the sale of goods, that it met your perception of instant gratification. Neither of those two things are fundamentally sound. [34]

Just like another training method that has for the last few decades been successfully suppressed – stretching. Because it too – God forbid – is not equipment dependant…yet!

Who’s promoting you to flexibility? No one because they can’t make any money out of it. What’s the other thing? It’s one of the few physical qualities where perhaps more is better. How are you going to sell that? I want you to stretch for 20 hours a week. Not too many people want to join me. 

I’ll go and stretch for two hours. Who’s going to come with me? It doesn’t meet the social trend. Because you are marketing driven to be this, and the quickness, the marketing stimuli is so short and fast now that no one produces articles. They produce short things and they’ll be this and they’ll be this. And instead of every month, they go every week and it’s every day and it’s five times a day. And that’s the speed of marketing. The world isn’t stretch deficient because stretching isn’t effective. It’s just not marketable from the American marketing perspective. [35]

I know the world has fallen off the map when it comes to appropriate application of stretching.  I fear also that abdominal training may be slipping as well – for the same reason. Exercises that do not rely on equipment threaten the take up of equipment sales for those exercises that are reliant on equipment. Your training habits are up against well-funded opposition. You need to decide whose interests you are going to serve.

Conclusion

So, there you have it. You have the opportunity for ‘Awesome Abs’, but odds are, at least from my perspective, you probably won’t achieve them.   That may be harsh, but from travelling the world helping athletes and others with their training during the last half a century, that’s the conclusion I’ve reached.

But there is hope.

Provided you are ready and willing to take a bigger picture view of your abdominals, and to step outside the comfort and confines of the average person’s choices. To ‘think for yourself’. [36]

To help you do this, I have a created a book to help – and yes, the book is titled ‘Awesome Abs!’

When the abdominal student is ready, the ‘Awesome Abs!’ book can appear. That’s up to you. And of course, your view of the abdominals purpose and whether you feel you have fulfilled the potential of your abdominals.

 

References

[1] King, I., 2001, Thinking Man’s Guide to Ab Training, Testosterone, Issue No. 4, April 2001, p. 42-49. (Article)

[2] King, I., 2002, Awesome Abs – Stage 1, t-mag.com, 12 April 2002. (Article)

[3] King, I., 2002, Get Buffed! II: Get MORE Buffed! Ch. 9 – The abdominal exercises. (Book)

[4] King, I., 2026, Awesome Abs – Ch. 3- Why do abdominal training, Get Buffed Specialization Series (Book)

[5] King, I., 2026, Awesome Abs – Introduction, Get Buffed Specialization Series (Book)

[6] King, I., 2025, Legacy – Ian King’s Training Innovations – Volume 1 – Parts 1 & 2 : Injury Prevention and Performance Enhancement – Theory #94 – The pelvis force couple (Book, 2nd Ed.)

[7] King, I., 2016, A coach’s guide to preventing, identifying, managing, and rehabilitating lower back injuries, SWIS Presentation, Canada

[8] King, I., 2018, Does powerlifting transfer to sport? SWIS Convention Canada, 28 Oct 2018

[9] King, I., 2025, Legacy – Ian King’s Training Innovations – Volume 1 – Parts 1 & 2 : Injury Prevention and Performance Enhancement – Theory #95 – Who’s winning the battle? (Book, 2nd Ed.)

[10] King, I., 2010, Barbells & Bullshit, Los Angeles, 2 Oct 2010 (Seminar)

[11] King, I., 2010, Barbells & Bullshit, Los Angeles, 2 Oct 2010 (Seminar)

[12] King, I., 2001, Pelvis has left the building – How pelvic alignment and proper exercise program design can keep the injury goblins at bay, t-mag.com, 28 Dec 2001

[13] King, I., 1998, How to Write Strength Training Programs, Prioritizing muscle groups (Book)

[14] King, I., 2011, KSI Coach Education Program, L1 Legacy, Unit 10 – Balance (Course)

[15] King, I., 2013, Legacy – Ian King’s Training Innovations, Ch. 28- Prioritization (Book)

[16] King, I., 2015, Strength training and injury prevention, Presentation at the 2015 Society of Weight Training Specialists (SWIS) Symposium, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 13-14 November 2015 (Presentation; Video)

[17] King, I., 2018, Ian King’s Guide to Strength Training, Vol. 3 – How to transfer strength training, Chapter 6

Avoiding creating new imbalances (Book)

[18] King, I., 2026, Legacy – Ian King’s Training Innovations – Volume 2 – Parts 3 & 4: Flexibility & Strength, Theory #255 – Reimagining strength training prioritization, (Book, 2nd Ed.)

[19] King, I., 2026, Get Buffed! V – Get Optimally Buffed, Chapter 7 Program design for Neuromuscular Optimization (Book)

[20] King, I., 2002, Get Buffed! II (Book), Sequence of Abdominal Training within the Workout, p. 130

[21] King, I., 2025, Legacy – Ian King’s Training Innovations – Volume 1 – Parts 1 & 2 : Injury Prevention and Performance Enhancement – Theory #99 – Abs first (Book, 2nd Ed.)

[22] King, I., 2003, Ask the Master (Book), p. 15

[23] King, I., 2001, Thinking Man’s Guide to Ab Training, Testosterone, Issue No. 4, April 2001, p. 42-49. (Article)

[24] Pearl, B., 1979, Keys to the Inner Universe, 1^st Ed., Physical Fitness Architects, Pasadena, California

[25] King, I., 1998, Strength Specialization Series (DVD)

[26] King, I., 1998, Strength Specialization Series (DVD)

[27] King, I., 2002, Get Buffed! II: Get MORE Buffed! Ch. 9 – The abdominal exercises. (Book)

[28] May, R., 1953, Man’s Search for Himself (Book)

[29] King, I., 2022, Off the Record #122 – We work together every week, 6 April 2022 (Article)

[30] King, I., 2025, Legacy – Ian King’s Training Innovations – Volume 1 – Parts 1 & 2 : Injury Prevention and Performance Enhancement – Theory #27 – It’s a conspiracy (Book, 2nd Ed.)

[31] King, I., 2025, Legacy – Ian King’s Training Innovations – Volume 1 – Parts 1 & 2 : Injury Prevention and Performance Enhancement – Theory #122 – Training trends are commercially driven (Book, 2nd Ed.)

[32] King, I., 1997, Winning and Losing (book), Chapter 7 – Training Theories, p. 41-42

[33] King, I., 2018, KSI Coaching Program, L0 – Orientation, Unit 2 – What are the influences on the way I train my clients?

[34] King, I., 2010, It won’t sell, 8 Oct 2010, YouTube

[35] King, I., 2010, It won’t sell, 8 Oct 2010, YouTube

[36] King, I., 2025, Legacy – Ian King’s Training Innovations – Volume 1 – Parts 1 & 2 : Injury Prevention and Performance Enhancement – Theory #124 – Over-react in the short-term and under-react in the long-term (Book, 2nd Ed.)