Last night around midnight I had a touch of the insomnia and whipped off a quick blog. This is known as SDIB, or Sleep-Deprivation Induced Blogging, which is not to be confused with BUI, Blogging Under the Influence.  The primary symptom of BUI is waking up with one's head collapsed on the keyboard, a home page full of Invective Against All That is Good--which you dimly recognize as your own writing--staring you in the face, and a "Comments" box underneath which tells you that 372 people you've never met before think you're a  blithering moron. 

But that didn't happen this time, because I never hit "Publish." 

What I wrote was an angry diatribe against my personal training brethren who are still doing crunches and crunch-like movements with virtually all of their clients.  Let's just say that it was a little unfair and unbalanced--in both senses of the word.  

But I will say this:  I'm writing a piece on core training for a print-and-online publication called Experience Life, which if you've never checked out you should.  I'm not going to spill all my pearls of new-found wisdom here, but as I've researched the topic, it's become clear to me that most people are just plumb doing it all wrong when it comes to core training:  they're still doing a billion crunches for their core muscles, and they still hurt their backs reaching for their toothbrushes. In fact, they might even be more likely to injure their backs.

Why is this?  Well for one thing, a crunch isn't very functional.  That is, it resembles neither an everyday-life movement nor an athletic motion.  The only time we do something reliably crunch-like is when we roll out of bed in the morning; if you're flat on your back and have to get up, the game's usually over. 

The crunch, simply put, doesn't train the stomach muscles to do what they're supposed to do.  Doing crunches is a bit like training an elephant to walk on its hind legs:  the elephant can do it, but she's not all that happy about it, no matter how broadly the guy in the Tarzan suit is smiling, and pretty soon that elephant's going to be on injured reserve.

So how should we train the core?  I'm still figuring that out, and finding that it's actually pretty complicated.  Unlike, say, the pecs and lats and biceps and all those muscle groups that bodybuilders love, the muscles around the spine and abdomen don't typically behave in a simple stretch-shorten manner.  Whether you're making a block on the football field or just trying to sit up straight in you chair, the core muscles act more like shock-absorbers and stabilizers, isometrically contracting to keep us upright when something threatens to knock us over, whether it's the force of gravity or a 300-pound defensive tackle.

How you train your muscles for that kind of action without hiring a bunch of trained monkeys to bum rush you when you least expect it like Cato in the Pink Panther movies requires some ingenuity.   But I'm talking to some people who are way smarter than I am to help me figure it out, including some of my fitness heroes, including Michael Boyle and Dr. Stuart McGill.

But crunches, again, are decidedly not the answer.  In fact, they're part of the problem.  As it turns out, repeated spinal flexion--bending forward against gravity, as in a crunch--is the most efficient way to do damage to a spine. According to Boyle, in labs that test such things, researchers who wish to replicate spinal trauma will place a cadaver's spine into a machine that flexes and extends the spine over and over.  You don't have to squint too hard to see that the movement looks suspiciously like a crunch. 

Which you see personal trainers teaching unwitting clients every day in gyms around the world.

So the very movement that was thought to help prevent injury by supporting the back, is, in fact, the fastest way to hurt that same area. 

Oops.