SCIENCE YOUR WAY TO CORE STRENGTH

Forget HIIT and crunches. The best way to shed body fat and shred your core is this cutting-edge eight-week workout plan (and these next-level nutrition tips).

- EBENEZER SAMUEL, CSCS

THE TRUE ROUTE to core strength-and to the hard, toned look many guys seek-has always been about more than crunches and hours of cardio. To shed belly fat and build brick-strong abs, you have to train your core using two key science-backed strategies.

First, you'll need to work through unilateral exercises, moves that challenge each side of your body in different ways. These exercises activate your lower back and ab muscles, which stabilize your spine against unique forces, an approach championed by top PTs like Dr. Aaron Horschig, best known on Instagram as Squat University.

The workout also teaches you to move at different speeds, sometimes doing exercises very quickly and sometimes doing them super slowly. This keeps your abs (and other muscles) off-balance and is a tactic often utilized by top pro-athlete trainers. Doing this not only engages a host of important but often ignored core muscles, such as your abs, obliques, back extensors, and glutes, but it slingshots your calorie burn into the stratosphere.

You'll blast your core with unilateral exercises and speed changes throughout this eight-week program, and there's an added bonus too. You'll improve the critical functions of your abs and lower back, mastering bracing, spinal flexion, rotation, anti-rotation, and antiextension. You'll also learn to progressively overload key exercises, which will help you fry fat as you build muscle. It's not easy. To get results, you'll have to push through four days of weight training a week, get in some cardio, and make some key nutrition tweaks.

YOUR WEEKLY SCHEDULE

You'll train four days a week. Rest fully at least one day per week. Want to sneak in cardio? Aim for a relaxed 20-minute run or bike ride. During weeks 3, 5, and 7, try to add at least 5 pounds to the final 2 sets of any move marked with an asterisk.