4 Core Workouts You Can Do At Home
Strengthen your abs to boost your efficiency and better your posture on the run.
Running is a total-body workout. Even though your legs propel you forward, your core is your power center, allowing for easy energy transfer between your upper and lower body. Without a strong core, you lack efficiency on the run, along with poor posture as your midsection muscles keep you upright.
Research shows how important core workouts are for your running performance. For example, when researchers divided a group of 21 male college athletes into a control group and a group that did core training, the participants who performed three core workouts per week for eight weeks improved their running economy and static balance, according to a 2019 PLoS One study.
As you strengthen the muscles in your abdominals, lower back, and glutes (all muscles of the core), you’ll develop more power, stability, and endurance.
Here, we have four core workouts you can do at home, which are sampled from Run 360, the total training system for runners created by Jeremy Shore, a certified strength and conditioning specialist who has spent more than 20 years helping people enhance their running and athletic performance. (RW+ premium members can access the workouts on the All-Out Studio app.)
How to use this list: First, scroll down to review each of the four core workouts at home, as they each have a different focus: power, strength, stability, or balance. Then, see the moves you need to master below as demonstrated by Lindsey Clayton, chief instructor at Barry’s in New York City.
You’ll see one exercise listed as the “hub exercise”—this is the main move that you’ll repeat after every two supporting exercises. By repeating the hub exercise, you’ll focus your efforts on building power, strength, stability, or balance while the non-hub exercises help train additional muscles and give you an added challenge. To build your core strength even more, you can find similar at-home ab workouts in the Run 360 program.
How to do each workout: Repeat each exercise below for 30 seconds, followed by a 15-second rest between moves, for a 5-minute circuit. You can add one circuit to the end of your run as a finisher or use it as a part of your cross-training workouts.
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