Core Values, by Lou Schuler

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A few weeks back, a friend of mine who's in his late 50s emailed to gloat about his success in the weight room. He'd finally abandoned barbell and dumbbell exercises, he told me, and was totally kicking butt on the machines. He even boasted about his ability to use the entire weight stack on the leg-adduction machine.

"Congratulations," I replied. "You're the strongest girl in the gym."

My friend is a gifted athlete who suffers from chronic back, knee, and foot problems. I've tried over the years to convince him that these injuries, in all likelihood, are systemic and related to each other. If my hunch is correct, that means there's a problem that can be addressed with physical therapy and dedicated rehab.

Most likely, such a problem would originate somewhere in his "core" - the chunk of the body that includes the abdominals, spinal erectors, gluteals, and all the other muscles that act on the hips and pelvis. These are the body's biggest, strongest, and, at times, most problematic muscles.

The workouts in The New Rules of Lifting and The New Rules of Lifting for Women, both of which are newly released in paperback, emphasize these muscles. Even when the muscles aren't directly targeted in exercises like squats, lunges, deadlifts, planks, and wood chops, they're forced to work to stabilize your body on standing shoulder presses, bent-over rows, and other movements.

My coauthor Alwyn Cosgrove, who designed the workouts in both books, kept supported exercises like bench presses and lat pulldowns to a minimum. When possible and practical, he chose exercises in which you have one or both feet on the floor, forcing you to employ your thigh, hip, and mid-body muscles to brace your spine and keep it in alignment with your hips and pelvis.

Control over these muscles isn't something you achieve so you can move on to other aspects of fitness; it's a moving target. A little tweak to something in the movement chain - a pulled calf muscle, irritation in your shoulder capsule - can change things just enough to throw another part of the movement chain out of balance. Then you need to go back to basics, to re-establish that alignment of your spine with your hips and pelvis and relearn how to brace your spine effectively so you can lift heavy things without injury.

But if you skip this process, if you focus on strengthening isolated muscles with no regard for how they work in coordinated action with other muscles, you risk making everything worse. Bigger and stronger individual muscles are only useful to you if they're in balance with the other muscles in the movement chain.

And if the muscles in the middle aren't a vital component of almost every exercise you do, you'll never be able to enjoy the benefits of making the muscles surrounding your core bigger and stronger.

So, while my friend may enjoy his newfound prowess on the gym's machines, I doubt if he'll see any benefit once he steps away from them.