Any tips for beginner core strength?

I found a 30 day core challenge app that I'm using as a side for beginner mma push ups leg raises and planks with the potential to add in bicycles at some point, and mountain climbers as part of a cardio challenge that doesn't involve running (ow) and jumping (watch me trip over my own feet midair.

Your core is designed to assist the rest of your body, so good core workouts involve your other muscle groups (legs, chest, upper back, etc). I'd follow a standard, full-body strength program - those work the core plenty. Popular strength programs here include NROL and Stronglifts. There's also one in my profile. Or work with a personal trainer.
Newbies do best with full-body workouts (not body-part split workouts) done every 2-3 days.

Squats and deadlifts.

lovellm122 wrote: »

I would suggest that you do strength traing 5-6 days a week, focusing on one muscle group each day. Chest - Monday. Back - Tuesday. Shoulders - Wednesday. Arms - Thursday. Legs - Friday. Once you develop a training programme you will find that you are both isolating muscles to grow but also increasing core strength.... If you wanted to know the key exercises for core strength i would state that they are deadlifting, barbell squats, barbell chest press, and barbell shoulder press.... Tip: Strength exercises which are performed stood up rather than sat down significantly increase core strength..... Hope that helps

Nnnnooo.... the OP likes to run marathons, so strength training is secondary and five days is way overkill for a marathon runner. In this situation for sure, the OP needs 2 to 3 days tops. Training body parts is actually very inefficient for the majority of athletes.

My final project for school was writing a literature review and my topic was core training. Exercise selection was part of my review, here's a quick review of what I found.

Heavy Squats & Deadlifts @ about 70% to 90% of 1RM are excellent, and really the best, at recruiting your Erectors, Multifidus, Quadratus Lumborum, Glutes, and Hips but were roughly equal or less for training the obliques, rectus abdominus, and transversus abdominus when compared to planks, anti-rotational exercises, and something as simple as a "drawing-in maneuver" for the TrA.

With that being said Squatting and / or Deadlifting will train most of your core very well but doing some kind of Planks, Palloff Press, and stuff like that would be good to add for some of the other components of your core muscles. You don't need to do a lot either, 1 to 3 exercises tops. I didn't catch anything specific to standing pressing exercises but a certain degree of rationale suggests that they will also work your core musculature very well but are they better / worse than more core specific exercises I would not know.

For you, if your main interest is running marathons and you do strength training to be better at running; I would keep your training incredibly simple.

my trainers got me on plank pushups, crunches, bicycle situps, russian twists and supermen. all 3x15 and I really feel its worked after Ive done the workout. (im lifting as well 3-4 times a week, but that is more focused on the rest of the body, although goes without saying that the core benefits from a lot of that as well)

military fitness is a great place to go for most any exercise and core included...

Big fan of the P90x Core Synergistics workout -- it peaks up once you get about half-way through the program and is very fun / challenging. Also, p90x3 (the newest version) is heavily focused on core strength.

I'm probably going to sound like a p90x apologist -- but these have really done a lot for me!