Posted by admin | Posted in Men's Health | Posted on 11-09-2009
Tags: Body Exercise, Bodybuilding, Cable Crunches, Desk Jockey, Endurance, Exact Mechanism, Exercise Time, Great Abs, Half The Time, Herniated Disc, Intervals, Motions, Mountain Climbers, Resistance Cable, Side Planks, Sit Ups, Situps, Spinal Flexion, Ups, Variations
Yes, it’s true. These two standard ab exercises, crunches and situps, can actually be murder on your low back.
Why? Because they involve spinal flexion (rounding your lower back to allow you to bend forward at the waist). But according to research, that’s the exact mechanism that causes a herniated disc in your lower back. After all, most people “throw their back out” bending over to pick something off the ground.
So it makes sense to limit the amount of traditional sit-ups and crunches in your program. Plus, you can’t spot reduce the fat from one area, so you are better off spending that exercise time on a better total body exercise or intervals. If you want to flatten your abs, you need to lose body fat.
So to improve your abs, use the following techniques:
1) Take half the time you were spending on abs, and do intervals with that time instead.
2) Spend the rest of your ab training time doing endurance ab exercises, such as planks, side planks, mountain climbers, and variations of these exercises.
3) Keep your abs braced in all exercises so that you work your abs in every movement that you do.
For advanced bodybuilding, there will come a time that you will need to do traditional crunching motions. But it is best, for results (i.e. growing your abs) to do these with resistance. Cable crunches are good, and you can get results with a relatively small amount of spinal flexion.
But really, when it comes to having great abs, losing body fat is the most important aspect for most people. And if you are a desk jockey, its more important for you to have abdominal endurance than to risk your back with classic ab exercises.