These Underappreciated Muscles Can Help You Go Farther, Stronger
This is Your Quick Training Tip, a chance to learn how to work smarter in just a few moments so you can get right to your workout.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a stay-at-home dad or fortune 500 CEO—finding time to work out takes effort (and sometimes a minor miracle), so when you do, it makes sense to focus on the muscles with the greatest metabolic and aesthetic payoffs.
That probably means you'll be giving your attention to your pecs, biceps, triceps, quads, hams, glutes, and abs. But if you want to elevate your training from “getting the job done” to “sculpting the body of an elite athlete,” you need to start paying attention to the muscles that most guys overlook, including the hugely underappreciated intercostals.
Never heard of them? Most people haven’t, even though everyone uses them every second of every day. Nestled between your ribs, the intercostals comprise several groups of muscles that help expand and contract your chest cavity when you breathe. They’re constantly working, which is why they typically remain out-of-mind until you suffer an intercostal strain, and then every breath feels like a sucker punch.
Training these muscles likely won’t increase your 1RM on the bench or turn heads at the beach (unless you drop your body fat into the very low double digits so you can see them), so why should you bother strengthening them? Easy: Doing so can help you breath more powerfully and efficiently, paying performance dividends any time you’re physically active.
If you’re a runner, there’s an additional bonus to targeting your intercostals: a small study by British researchers found runners could run 12 percent farther when paired with a proper warmup.
Your move: The best way to work your intercostals is through “resisted breathing.” For that, you'll need some hardware.
You’ll have to shell out a bit of money for a handheld device such as the Airofit or the PowerLung, but by making breathing harder, they’ll help your breathing muscles become stronger. And that will pay off in better performance both in and out of the gym—especially on the roads and trails.
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