Are ab exercises bad, actually?

Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash

As a society, we’ve been sold a hell of a bill of goods about the abdominal muscles.

And before we go any further, I have to admit I’ve been complicit in some of those sales. If you haven’t read about my background, just know that for the first several years of my career as a magazine editor, I didn’t even blink at (and sometimes helped write) cover lines like “Get Flat Abs Faster!” “Easy Abs!” and “Flatten Your Belly and Speed Up Weight Loss (This Easy Trick Does Both!)” — and I used to answer the phone and get coffee for the guy who literally invented the Abs Diet and something called the Zero Belly Diet, which honestly is not even anatomically possible, but I digress. 

As much as I’d love to blame everything on diet magazines, it seems cinched waists and invisible bellies have been a beauty ideal in at least some cultures for millennia — apparently even Minoan women were wearing corsets in Crete around 1000 BC. But my industry deeply understood (and continues to understand, though in more purportedly empowering, “body positive” dressing) the emotional hold our midsections have on us, and plenty of other industries are also making serious bank on it. The idea of flat abs, or six-pack abs, or a toned belly, or whatever you want to call it, is incredibly clicky: It sells magazines and books and supplements and exercise programs and surgeries and medications, and gets you to stare at TikToks and YouTube videos and weird AI–generated posts on Facebook. And because the flat ab ideal is unrealistic, or at least unsustainable, promoting and normalizing it helps maintain a lucrative baseline of body dysmorphia, or at least shitty self-image, for a big chunk of the population. A truly uncountable number of people and companies profit from this one weird incredibly common body hangup.