Sit-Ups Don’t Cut It
When I was 11, one of my teachers decided to turn maths into a PE activity. Pair up, perform a group of exercises, record the results and then graph them.
There are two results I still remember very clearly. Push-ups: I couldn't do one. Sit-ups: I got to 45 before the teacher stopped me because everyone else had finished and they wanted to move on.
At 11, the only thing I really took from it was that I was hopeless at push-ups and pretty good at sit-ups. Forty-five years later, I look at that result very differently. Being able to do a lot of sit-ups tells you something, but not nearly as much as we once thought about how well the core can perform in sport.
For an athlete, the core isn't really an isolated group of muscles we train because we should probably “do some abs.” Its bigger job is helping connect and coordinate what is happening above and below it. Sometimes the trunk needs to create movement. At other times it needs to control or stop it. All the while, it is helping different parts of the body work together.
A sprinter is putting force into the ground while the arms and opposite leg are moving quickly around the pelvis. The trunk has to contribute to that action without letting the whole system become loose and disorganised. In other sports the details change, but the job is similar: create the movement that helps performance, control what needs controlling, and stop unnecessary movement from stealing from the task.
This is where coaches often talk about energy leakage. It is a useful description, but it can also be taken too literally. Energy is not simply disappearing somewhere around your waist because your abdominal muscles are not strong enough. The problem is more often that movement is poorly timed or poorly controlled. The athlete is still producing plenty of effort, but some of it is not being directed as effectively as it could be.
Think about a sprinter driving out of the blocks. The legs might be capable of producing plenty of force, but that force still has to be organised through the pelvis and trunk while the arms and opposite leg are moving aggressively. If the athlete loses position through the pelvis or trunk, they have not suddenly become weaker. They have simply become less effective at using the force they already have.
For Masters athletes, this becomes especially important. Not because ageing automatically gives you a weak core, but because the trunk is often being asked to do more with less.
If a hip no longer extends as well, or an old ankle injury still changes the way you move, the body will usually find another way to get the job done. Often some of that extra movement comes from the pelvis or trunk. At the same time, force may not be produced as quickly as it once was, and poor positions can be harder to correct once they start to develop. The trunk is therefore doing more than simply transferring force. It may also be managing the consequences of what is no longer happening as well elsewhere.
Lifestyle can add to that. For many Masters athletes, daily life is simply less physically demanding than it once was. There is more sitting and driving, and often less time spent moving through different positions or doing the incidental lifting and carrying that used to happen without much thought. Sitting does not somehow switch the core off, but it can mean the trunk is challenged less often across the day.
That leaves less room for inefficiency. A younger athlete with plenty of power and elastic ability can sometimes get away with poor positions because there is more physical capacity to cover the mistake. As we get older, those spare resources are harder won. If I have spent months helping a 55-year-old sprinter maintain strength and power, I do not want part of that advantage undermined because they cannot organise the pelvis and trunk at speed.
Saying somebody needs a “strong core” does not really tell us much. Strong enough to do what?
Sport rarely asks us simply to contract the abdominal muscles as hard as possible. Sometimes the trunk has to create movement, sometimes it has to brake it, and sometimes it has to stay relatively quiet while large forces are being produced around it. A rigid trunk is not automatically a good trunk. A sprinter who tried to lock the torso completely would not run particularly well, and neither would a swimmer who tried to eliminate all trunk rotation.
This is where sit-ups start to look fairly limited. A sit-up mainly trains trunk flexion. That can be useful, but it is only one small part of what the core does in sport. It tells us very little about whether an athlete can keep the pelvis organised while producing force through one leg, deal with an uneven load or create and then control rotation.
Early in a program I may still use very simple exercises. A dead bug, a carry or a cable exercise can all be useful, but only if there is a reason for them to be there. I am less interested in ticking off a list of “core exercises” than in seeing whether the athlete can control the pelvis and trunk when something else is trying to pull them out of position.
From there, the challenge needs to become more dynamic and start asking the trunk to deal with forces that look more like the sport. For a sprinter, that might be during heavy single-leg work or while producing force rapidly on the track. In another sport, it may mean generating rotation and then controlling it. The exercise matters less than whether it reflects the problem the athlete actually has to solve.
Better core training is not a magic route to running faster, swimming faster or hitting a ball harder. If an athlete needs more leg strength, we still need to improve leg strength. If their sprint mechanics are poor, a Pallof press is not going to fix them. Technique, power, mobility and the demands of the sport still matter.
For Masters athletes, the point is fairly simple. Strength, speed and power are harder won as we get older, so we want to use them well. The trunk has to contribute when movement is needed, control it when it starts to get messy and help the rest of the body stay connected.
So I have nothing against sit-ups. I was pretty good at them once. I just wouldn't confuse being good at sit-ups with having a core that can do everything sport asks of it.
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