Why Anti-Movement Core Training Matters for Swimmers

Core training is one of the best ways to get faster in the pool—and anti-movement exercises provide the foundation for everything that follows.

Core training is one of the smartest things that swimmers can do for better performances in the water.

Just about everything we do in the water revolves around the core:

• Controls body roll and rotation
• Transfers force from the upper to the lower body
• Adjusts bodyline and position to reduce drag
• Increases swimming velocity (Karpinski et al., 2020)

And much more.

Developing the core used to mean the standard core exercises for swimmers: lots of crunches, V-sits, leg raises, Russian twists, and all the other dynamic core exercises we can handle.

While those exercises still have a role to play, anti-movement core exercises offer a smarter way to go about core training.

Here’s what to know about this type of core exercise and why swimmers should be all about doing them.

What is Anti-Movement Core Training?

Anti-movement core training is where you train the trunk to resist motion. Whether it’s flexion, extension, or lateral flexion, anti-movement core exercises keep your spine in place in the face of external forces that want to bend your trunk.

So instead of flexing, bending, or extending the spine—like you do with crunches, leg raises, and so on—the goal is to keep the spine stable and your trunk in siege mode.

This distinction may seem silly, and most swimmers and coaches will raise an eyebrow and think that a core exercise is a core exercise, but shifting from dynamic to anti-movement can open the door to true trunk stability that delivers results in the pool.

Anti-Movement versus Dynamic Core Exercises

Anti-movement core training offers a powerful alternative to dynamic core exercises that often lead to reduced time under tension, “cheating” (via using momentum), or not engaging the correct muscle groups.

There’s research to back it up, too.

A recent study (Cinarli & Kafkas, 2025) took a group of trained participants and split them into three groups: a dynamic core exercise group, an anti-movement core group, and a control group.

The dynamic core training group did some of the classic core exercises you’ve seen in the gym and on the pool deck over the years. Sit-ups, leg raises, Russian twists, back extensions, and so on.

The anti-movement core training group did exercises that focused on stability and posture. Pallof press, planks, side planks.

Adapted from Cinarli et al., 2025

After six weeks, doing two sessions per week, both groups improved trunk muscle efficiency—in other words, they required less muscle activity to engage the core. This is good.

But the anti-movement group produced larger reductions in muscle activity for the same endurance task—about 22-53% lower activation compared to 16-29% for the dynamic group.

Basically, the anti-movement group developed better neuromuscular efficiency. The trunk got better at doing the job with less effort.

Why This Matters for Swimmers

Swimming is basically a series of running anti-movement challenges.

Even though we are trying to displace water, kick and pull with more force, and just generally get our chlorinated behinds to the other end of the pool faster, we are also doing a lot of braking and resisting with our trunk muscles.

For example, a study with elite swimmers (Andersen et al., 2021) measured trunk activity during freestyle swimming and saw that the trunk muscles did not engage until after the rotation of the upper torso had already begun.

See also: 5 Dryland Core Workouts for Faster Swimming

The core didn’t start the upper torso twist, but it did engage significantly after rotation had begun. This is textbook anti-movement—the core is active in order to control body position and stabilize the spine, and not to generate rotation.

In addition, anti-movement core training is crucial for swimmers because:

• Increases trunk efficiency – We only have so much energy to use when swimming. A more efficient core allows us to swim further and with less energy. This study suggests that anti-movement core exercises can achieve this.
• Highly swimmer-friendly – Anti-movement core training is highly swimmer-applicable. Swimmers work hard to maintain body position and resist the forces created by buoyancy, roll, and limb movement. Pallof presses, suitcase carries, planks—these all mirror the stability demands of swimming.
• Less movement usually means better muscle engagement – Core training is often where form and technique go to die. Legs start to swing, limb momentum covers sloppy technique, and the lower back rounds. Anti-movement core exercises zero in on what needs to be trained. (Also increases time under tension, which is a nice bonus.)
• More applicable to swimming performance – Crunches used to be the daily driver for many swimmers’ core training. While they can certainly build a chiseled six-pack, they do so through tons of trunk flexion. This leads to tightening between the rib cage and pelvis, which is the opposite of what swimmers want. In the water, swimmers need a long, stable torso that can transfer force, not one that is curled over. There are lots of ways to hammer the rectus abdominis—Pot stirrers and roll-outs, to name a couple—that also serve our goals in the water.

Anti-Movement Core Exercises Train the Deep Stabilizers

There’s one more big reason to make anti-movement core exercises foundational to your dryland training. They work your deep stabilizers. And these core muscles are critical for fast swimming.

Here’s why: The first thing you do when you react to the starter’s signal, take a strong, or push-off is bracing the spine. This is an automatic process, you don’t think about it—your body knows to just do it. The muscle responsible for this, the transversus abdominis (TA), is like a weight belt around your midsection that stiffens the spine before movement.

When this muscle is tired or undertrained, it takes longer to stiffen up the spine (leading to slower reactions and movements) or is simply unable to provide enough trunk stiffness to properly transfer force.

In both cases, you can’t kick or pull with as much force, and swimming performance suffers. The good news is that these stabilizers can be trained with classic anti-movement core exercises.

A study (Selkow et al., 2017) measured TA activity before and after a four-week rehab program that included some classic anti-movement core exercises:

• Side plank
• Bird dogs
• Abdominal drawing-in.

Participants measurably improved how strongly the transversus abdominis fired and how early it switched on.

These muscles are easy to ignore because you’ll never see them in the mirror next to the showy abs. But they’re the ones quietly setting up every stroke, kick, and split—and anti-movement core exercises are the right movements to improve this capacity.

The Bottom Line

Core training is one of the dryland essentials swimmers rely on to get faster in the pool.

But the specific mechanisms by which this happens isn’t always clear. We know that core training is important, but there isn’t always that direct line of “ahhhh that’s why I do those ab exercises!” between what we are doing in the gym and how we are swimming in the pool.

By now, you’ve seen how crucial anti-movement core exercises are to a productive dryland and more importantly, how they relate directly to faster swimming.

Add them to your dryland, stiffen up that spine, make your trunk muscles more efficient, and unlock some faster swimming.