After 15 years of coaching athletes, I thought I had core training figured out. Planks, dead bugs, cable crunches, hanging leg raises — I had my toolkit and I trusted it. Then a competitive CrossFit athlete walked into my gym…
My first “home gym” was two 25-pound dumbbells I found at a garage sale and a pull-up bar wedged into a doorframe — I made that setup work for over a year, grinding out curls and pull-ups and telling myself I was building a bulletproof core. It wasn’t until I finally stepped into a real … Read more
Junior year of college, I was studying pre-med and training at the same time, which meant I had to get ruthlessly efficient — every minute in the gym had to count. So when I realized I’d been grinding out set after set of crunches and planks for months with almost nothing to show for it, … Read more
When I first signed up for a gym at nineteen, I had no idea what I was doing — I spent the first three weeks just doing bicep curls and treadmill because everything else looked too complicated. Eventually I worked up the courage to try ab exercises, and like most beginners, I went straight for … Read more
I trained like I had a scholarship on the line during my junior year of high school — six days a week, no off-season, no rest weeks — and I burned out completely before senior year, which is exactly when I learned that grinding harder without a real plan doesn’t build anything except frustration. That … Read more
The summer before my sophomore year of college, I worked a warehouse job and trained every morning before my shift — and that combination taught me more about recovery than any article I ever read. It also taught me something unexpected about ab training: the exercises I’d been doing religiously, mostly endless sets of crunches, … Read more