I was probably seven or eight months pregnant, standing at the front of the room after teaching a barbell class, when one of my regulars said something along the lines of, “You’re almost ready to have that baby and your planks still look better than mine.”
I took the compliment.
Because, well… thank you very much- I'm a bad ass pregnant mama to be.
My very pregnant plank did look pretty darn good. Straight line, strong position, no bum sticking up in the air, no hips sagging toward the floor. If you had taken a picture, there probably wasn’t much I would have changed.
There was just one problem I wouldn’t figure out until much later.
I barely felt my abs.
Which is a little inconvenient when one of the reasons you’re choosing plank is to challenge your core which includes your abs.
Why don’t I feel planks in my abs?
First, not feeling a massive abdominal burn during plank doesn’t automatically mean you’re doing it wrong.
A plank is not an abs-only exercise. Your shoulders, arms, legs, glutes and other muscles are all contributing to the position. That’s part of what makes plank such a useful whole-body exercise.
But if one of your reasons for choosing plank is to challenge your core and you’re barely noticing your abdominals at all, that’s information worth paying attention to.
And this is where my technically lovely plank gets interesting.
Before fitness became my career, I went to acting school. One of my acting teachers was… intense.
Every morning, we did yoga, and one of the things that was drilled into us was distributing our weight through our hands and feet in a Downward Facing Dog.
I got VERY good at that.
So good, apparently, that years later I could hold a plank and distribute the work beautifully through the rest of my body. My shoulders were working. My legs were working. My glutes were working.
And my abs were apparently enjoying a lovely little vacation.
But from the outside? Great plank.
Can a plank look right and still not be working the way you expect?
Absolutely.
And I think this is where our obsession with what an exercise looks like can sometimes get in the way of learning from it.
Technique matters. I care about how you’re positioned. I care about how you’re performing an exercise. There are reasons coaches teach technique in the first place.
But technique gives us a starting point.
It doesn’t tell us the whole story about what you’re experiencing.
If I had only ever asked, “Does my plank look right?” I probably wouldn’t have learned very much from this experience.
I needed another question: What am I actually feeling?
That question changed a lot about how I understood my own plank, and eventually, how I coached other people too.
What should you feel during a plank?
There’s no single sensation every person needs to experience during every plank.
You may notice your shoulders working. You may feel your legs and glutes contributing. And if you’re deliberately using plank as a way to challenge your core, you may also be looking for a sense of abdominal effort as you maintain the position.
What matters is that you start noticing.
- Where do you feel the work?
- Where don’t you feel it?
- Does something start aching as you get tired?
- Does your experience change if you adjust your position?
- What happens if you shorten the hold?What happens if you try another variation?
These aren’t questions you have to answer “correctly.” They’re information.
For example, if you choose the hardest-looking plank you can manage but your lower back starts aching while your abdominals don’t seem particularly involved, I wouldn’t hand you a tiny trophy for staying on your toes.
I’d want to know what happens if we change something.
The goal isn’t to win at plank.
The plank variation that helped me find my abs
For me, one of those experiments was Sphinx Plank, a forearm plank variation.
And there they were. My abs. HELLOOOOOO.
For whatever reason, this position gave me a much clearer sense of abdominal involvement than any other traditional plank I had used.
That didn’t mean Sphinx Plank was magically “better.”
It gave me something more useful than that.
It gave me a reference point.
Suddenly I knew what I was looking for. I could recognize what meaningful abdominal involvement felt like in my body, and eventually I could take that information back into my traditional plank and experiment with creating it there too.
That is a very different way of thinking about exercise variations.
Instead of: Easy plank → harder plank → hardest plank, we can start asking: What does this variation change, and what can I learn from it?
None of those positions is automatically the “right” plank.
I’m using the different variations to gather information about my own body.
How to do a Sphinx Plank
If you’ve never tried Sphinx Plank before, I’m sharing the exercise breakdown below from my online personal training library.
This isn’t because Sphinx Plank is the secret exercise everyone needs to do if they can’t feel their abs during plank. Bodies are far too interesting for me to make you that promise.
It’s simply another option to explore.
As you try it, pay attention to what changes. What do you notice through your abdominals? Your shoulders? Your back? Is the experience different from your traditional plank?
You don’t have to decide whether one version is “better.”
Just notice what each one tells you.
Body awareness is a skill you can learn
By the time I had this plank revelation, I already had years of experience with exercise. I taught fitness. I knew anatomy. I understood technique.
And I was only beginning to understand body awareness.
Those aren’t the same thing.
You can have years of exercise experience and still be developing the ability to recognize where you feel a movement, describe that sensation and use what you notice to make adjustments.
That’s a skill. And like most skills, it gets better with practice.
It’s also one of the reasons that when someone I’m coaching asks, “Does this look right?” I don’t necessarily answer with yes or no and move along. I’m looking.
But I’m also probably going to ask: “What do you feel?”
Because the way a movement looks gives me information.
The way it feels gives me information too.
And good coaching pays attention to both.
Personal training should teach you more than how to copy an exercise
This is a big part of how I approach personal training.
Of course I’m going to teach you exercises and help you learn how to perform them. But I don’t want our entire relationship to be me standing there deciding whether your body is doing everything correctly. I want you involved in that conversation.
I want you to start recognizing what you feel, noticing when something changes and understanding why we might choose one exercise or variation over another.
- Maybe I change your setup.
- Maybe we shorten the range of motion.
- Maybe we choose another variation.
- Maybe that variation teaches you something useful and eventually you take what you learned back to the original exercise.
And sometimes we discover that the supposedly “easier” variation actually gives you exactly what you came for, so there’s no particular reason to graduate from it at all.
The goal isn’t to make your movement look more impressive.
It’s to help you become increasingly capable of understanding your own body and participating in the decisions we make about how you move it.
LEARN MORE ABOUT PERSONAL TRAINING
So if your plank looks great but you’re wondering why you don’t feel it in your abs, don’t immediately assume you need to try harder or choose a more difficult variation.
Get curious.
Change something.
Pay attention to what happens.
Because the hardest plank isn’t necessarily your best plank.
Sometimes the best variation is simply the one that helps you feel the work where you actually came to feel it.
