Each Mode Boot Camp workout finishes with 5 to 8 minutes of abdominal/core exercise. The exercises consist of partner drills as well as solo circuits. We wait until the end of the workout to do these exercises because the first 45 minutes of the workout involves heavy compound resistance training exercises for maximum fat loss, which requires that your core muscles are NOT pre-exhausted from doing core isolation exercises.
It’s a fundamental error in program design to do core isolation exercises before compound exercises that require the full strength of your core to stabilize yourself during the movement. Constantly at Coopers Park I see the franchised boot camp company start their workouts with abdominal isolation exercises, which is one of the most blatant violations of safe exercise program design as you’ll see (another violation: trying to cram 20+ people into one class). The reason why most personal trainers think that outdoor boot camp programs are a joke is because of companies such as that, who daily run what I (and every other personal trainer I’ve spoken to about it) consider to be some of the worst exercise programs I’ve ever witnessed in my 15 years involvement with this industry.
At my Vancouver boot camp program, we never do more than 5 to 8 minutes of dedicated core work. Anything more than that is overkill. The other day I saw the franchised boot camp company start their workout with about 30 minutes of abdominal isolation exercises, follow that up with a jog (I still can’t believe their participants aren’t up in arms for paying money for a workout only to be sent out jogging), and then finishing the workout with more abdominal isolation exercises. Why should you spend an entire workout just doing abs, and not do the same thing with other muscles? Are they promoting the idea of spot reduction? If a 60-minute ab workout is a good idea, why not also do a 60-minute gluteus medius workout? Perhaps an entire workout dedicated to isolating the sternocleidomastoid (neck). Maybe we’ll see them incorporate these into their fall program.
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