A Guide To Some Of The Best Abdominal Exercises Posted By: Greg Holmes.

Though abdominal exercises are really effective in increasing good posture, preventing low back pain and improving overall functioning and sports performance, they are not effective for spot reducing belly fat. So what are the best abdominal exercises for toning your core you may ask? The American Council on Exercise lists the bicycle as effective abdominal equipment that best utilizes every muscle in the abdomen to create a well-defined torso. Of course there are other exercises. Let’s take a look at which ones will work for your particular needs.You must first decide what your fitness goals are in order to determine what the best abdominal exercises will be for your needs. An example would be if someone has an achy lower back. Crunches with the feet up in the air may be the best because this exercise works the abdomen hard but does not put a lot of strain and pressure on the lower back. But, if you are an athlete who is looking for serious core strengthening, then double-hanging leg raises may be the best abs training for you.There have been studies done to find the safest abdominal exercises that measure the work-to-compression ratio.abdominal exercises exercise fitness

The Washboard Abs Scam

Copyright (c) 2008 Craig Pepin Donat

Often wish you had more time to spend on exercise? Trust me, you are not the only one. The number one reason people say they don’t exercise is due to lack of time. With people working longer hours during the workweek, commitments with family, longer drives to and from work, we often put ourselves last.

But can you really see fitness results in “five minutes a day,” the way home exercise equipment infomercials promise? Remember this: if it sounds too good to be true, it is. These products give hopeful consumers promises for “fast weight loss” and “million dollar abs.” Consumers abandon their fitness efforts completely when products are harder to use than they expected, or if they don’t see the results they thought they would see.

Ab Exercisers Worst of the Bunch The worst culprits when it comes to the “slimmer-in-only-five-minutes-a-day” scams are the ones that call themselves “ab exercisers.” The problem? Spot reduction does not work. The exercises may help you tone and build your muscles, but if your beautifully strong abs are hidden beneath layers of fat, no one will see the results!

We’re not saying ab exercises themselves are bad. We’re saying that these exercises alone will not get you those six-pack abs. Not even crunches will give you those resultsbut at least crunches don’t cost any money, plus they take up no room in your closet!

In a study conducted by the Biomechanics Lab at San Diego State University and funded by ACE (the American Council on Exercise), many ab exercisers advertised on infomercials were found to be no more effective or only slightly more effective than traditional crunches. Other ab equipment doesn’t require a study to support the fact that it won’t live up to its claims. All you need for that is common sense. A NASA scientist doesn’t need to sit on a tin can to know it won’t fly his butt to the moon.

Here are just a few of the ab exercisers that don’t live up to their hype and false promises.

Ab Lounge XL – The Ab Lounge XL claims to “tighten and tone upper abs, lower abs and obliques faster than you ever thought possible.” The product looks like a fold-up lounge chair, and the infomercials show people effortlessly rocking back and forth in the chair. Momentum is doing most of the work. Manufacturers claim the AB Lounge XL works because it provides a wider range of motion, keeping ab muscles working longer. But longer than what? And does it matter? Research shows that crunches are most effective when completed over a range of no more than 30 degrees. By putting this in your living room, it will more than likely be used as a chaise lounge instead of as an exerciser. Save your money, do crunches on a mat, and buy a La-Z-Boy if you want an extra chair. Torso Track – Once again, this product promises results in five minutes a day; be very skeptical of these claims. The user kneels on the attached kneepad and glides back and forth, exercising the abs, arms, shoulders, and back all in one motion. According to the ACE study, the Torso Track seemed to be marginally more effective than traditional crunches. However, the study reports, “This training benefit is likely offset by the lower-back discomfort reported by a significant number of subjects while using the Torso Track.” If it hurts, you’re doing it wrong! (I don’t mean the burn that comes from working muscles hard… I’m talking about aches and pains caused by straining and pulling in awkward positions.) The Web site claims this exerciser stores easily under the bed… and that’s where it should stay.

Ab Rocker – In two separate ACE studies, the Ab Rocker, perhaps the worst in the bunch, was shown to be 80 percent less effective than crunches. Why would someone want to spend money on an exerciser that is only one-fifth as effective of something you can do for free? Most users reported that it was difficult to use, and some reported tipping over backwards on it the first few times they tried! Ineffective and dangerous… a losing combination.

Red Exerciser – This is another example of how manufacturers try to create a new mousetrap to snare consumers but use the same old lies. The product claims you can reduce inches from your waistline by sitting on a red seat that spins like any office chair. By twisting your upper body from left to right while holding hand grips, you are supposedly exercising your midsection “where you need it, to sculpt a slimmer, new, you.” The biggest problem with this piece of equipment is that it is a rotary torso movement, which can place stress on the spine if not performed properly. The dangers are increased when additional resistance is added, placing more pressure on your spine as you twist your body back and forth. Those with back problems should avoid this movement altogether. There is a simple tension knob to adjust the resistance on the Red Exerciser called the “Torsion Max Resistance System,” which makes it sounds like there is some sort of advanced technology involved. This piece of equipment is anything but advanced. It’s just another marketing scheme and a waste of money.

The Bean – One of the newer ab exercisers, the Bean promises a “full-body workout in only five minutes a day!” If you read more closely, you’ll see you can use the Bean instead of a stability ball (exercise ball) for Pilates or Yoga. But why not just buy a much less expensive, more reliable, stability ball? Unfortunately there have been many reports of a deflating Bean and, since I purchased one myself to test and it did, in fact, deflate after only a few months, I can vouch for that theory. I have owned a stability ball for about ten years now and it’s still as good as new. The other problem with doing ab exercises on the Bean is that it allows you to rock back and forth, creating momentum. It’s a great ride if you have a four-year-old daughter like I do, but if you actually want to exercise your abdominal muscles, there are much better solutions for less money.

STOTT PILATES: The Secret To Flat Abs

STOTT PILATES: The Secret To Flat Abs

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Product Description

Let this beginner mat workout help you tone your deep abdominal and back muscles. Find the flatter, firmer abs you ve been looking for while strengthening the mind-body connection from the inside out. Master Instructor Moira Merrithew takes you through a revitalizing sequence that will leave you feeling strong, stretched and streamlined to the core. A moderately-paced workout suitable for beginners. Also, provides fresh programming ideas for fitness instructors. SUITABLE FOR: Beginner audiences (Level 1 of 5) EQUIPMENT REQUIRED: Exercise Mat

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How to Get Six Pack Abs : Bicycle Crunch Exercises for the Abs

Learn how to do exercises that work out the abdominal muscles, including how to do the bicycle crunch in this free video workout. Expert: Jacob Garcia Bio: Jacob Garcia is a certified personal trainer with disciplines from both the American Council on Exercise (ACE) and the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM). Filmmaker: Juan-Diego Garcia

Training for six pack abs – FAQ

Q1: How do I get abs like Dexter Jackson?
Getting visible abdominal muscles or “abs” depends on reducing the amount of fat covering the abs, see Question 3. Getting hard, lumpy abs depends on developing the underlying muscles, for details, read on…

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Q2: Should I do lots of situps to reduce fat around my middle?
No. Exercising the area from which you want to lose fat is called “spot reduction”. Spot reduction is now believed to be a myth. Research shows that fat is lost all over your body, not just in the area that you work. Situps are also bad for your lower back (see Question 5).

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Q3: How do I reduce the fat covering my middle?
The answer comes in two parts: diet and aerobic exercise.

DIET

Two principles loom large when trying to “sculpt” one’s body:

* Calorie accounting: To lose fat, one must reduce calorie intake and/or increase energy expenditure so that stored fat is utilized as fuel for the body.

* Biology is destiny: fat cells, whether increased in size, number or both, cannot turn into muscle cells.

Reducing the fat accumulation in one area of the body is not easy. The usual measures to lose weight (including reducing calorie intake, increasing exercise or both) may lead to weight loss but not necessarily in a single area. In fact, short of having cosmetic surgery (such as liposuction), you cannot easily choose the area from which the fat will be lost. This is the reason that some women notice that their breasts (which are largely composed of fat) get smaller when they diet.

And weight loss is more than just reducing “calories in” compared with “calories out.” The difficulty many people have in losing weight probably relates to a well-established phenomenon that seems terribly unfair: As you take in fewer calories, the body’s metabolism changes, so that fewer calories are burned with normal body function. In studies of persons losing 10 percent to 20 percent of their body weight, “calories out” diminished, despite similar activity levels, which slowed further loss of weight.

Given this grim reality, you cannot readily transform an abdomen with excess fat into the physique of your dreams simply by doing lots of sit-ups. You’ll lose the fat by diet and/or exercise, and you’ll increase muscle mass by exercising those muscles. Of course, there may be other reasons to do sit-ups — for example, strong abdominal muscles reduce the chances of back problems; but shrinking your abdomen is not one of them.

This is controversial, but most people agree that eating very little fat and lots of complex carbs (like rice, pasta and potatoes) helps ensure that you don’t add additional fat. Then you have to work at using the fat you already have stored which involves…

EXERCISE
Again a bit controversial, but it’s widely agreed that regular, moderate, aerobic exercise 3-4 times per week works best to burn fat that’s already stored.

“Moderate” because intense exercise burns glycogen not fat, so keep the intensity at about the level where you are beginning to puff a little.

“Aerobic” means (very vaguely) the kind of exercise that requires you to inhale more. Some suggest that building more muscle through weight training helps as well, since muscle burns fat just by being there and moving your body about; so some weight training couldn’t hurt and will probably help.

Many misc.fitness people agree that exercise periods of more than 20 minutes work best. But note that the longer you exercise, the more prone you are to injury since your muscles also begin to weaken. Two things which help prevent injury are:

a good warmup
5-10 minutes of light exercise to warm your muscles, try to break a sweat
stretching
cautious 20-30 sec stretches for every muscle .

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Q4: How do I exercise the abs?
The abs are designed to perform one main task, to shorten the distance between your sternum, or breastbone, and your pelvis. The only way to do this is to bend your spine in the lower back region.

In short, any exercise which makes you move your sternum toward your pelvis or your pelvis toward your sternum is good. To do this safely, the lower back should be slightly rounded, not arched.

In general when exercising the abs, try to maintain the natural arch of you lower back. The lower back will round slightly as you perform the exercises. Don’t fret about pressing your back into the ground.

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Q5: What’s wrong with situps?
Traditional situps emphasize sitting up rather than merely pulling your sternum down to meet your pelvis. The action of the psoas muscles, which run from the lower back around to the front of the thighs, is to pull the thighs closer to the torso. This action is the major component in sitting up. Because of this, situps primarily engage the psoas making them inefficient at exercising your abs. More importantly, they also grind the vertebrae in your lower back.

They’re inefficient because the psoas work best when the legs are close to straight (as they are when doing situps), so for most of the situp the psoas are doing most of the work and the abs are just stabilising.

Putting the thighs at a right angle to the torso to begin with means that the psoas can’t pull it any further, so all of the stress is placed on the abs.

Situps also grind vertebrae in your lower back. This is because to work the abs effectively you are trying to make the lower back round, but tension in the psoas encourages the lower back move into an exaggerated arch. The result is the infamous “disc pepper grinder” effect that helps give you chronic lower back pain in later life.
Q6: What are good ab exercises?
We’ve divided the exercises into upper and lower ab exercises. Note that there aren’t two separate muscles that you can truly isolate, so all the exercises stress the whole abdominal wall. However there are “clusters” of muscle separated by connective tissue (these make up the “washboard” or the “six-pack”). You can focus on the upper clusters by moving just the torso and the lower clusters by moving the pelvis.

For the lower abs, in increasing order of difficulty:

lying leg raises
reverse crunches
vertical lying leg thrusts
hanging knee raises
hanging leg raises

For the upper abs:

ab crunches
1/4 crunches
cross-knee crunches
pulldown crunches
Lower Ab Exercises

Lying Leg Raises
Lie on your back with your hands, palms down under your buttocks. Raise your legs about 30cm (12″) off the floor and hold them there. Now trying to use just your lower abs, raise your legs by another 15cm (6″). Do this by tilting the pelvis instead of lifting the legs with the psoas. Make sure your knees are slightly bent.

If you’re big or have long legs or both, you should probably avoid this exercise. For people with legs that are too heavy for their lower abs strength, this exercise pulls the lower back into an exaggerated arch which is bad (and painful). For reasons why it’s bad, see Question 5. If you have this problem you can either try bending your knees slightly and making sure you keep your lower back fairly flat, or just try another exercise.

Reverse Crunch

This exercise can be done on the ground or on an incline situp board. All you need is something behind your head to hold. If you use the incline board, use it with your feet lower than your head.

Lying on your back, hold a weight or a chair leg (if lying on the floor) or the foot bar (if using the situp board). Keep the knees slightly bent.

Pull your pelvis and legs up so that your knees are above your chest and then return to beginning position.

This exercise is very similar to a hanging knee raise, but a little less intense.

Vertical Lying Leg Thrusts

Initial position:

Lie on your back.
Put your fists under your buttocks to form a cradle.
Raise your legs in the air 20-30cm (10-12″) off the ground, knees slightly bent.
If you feel any strain on your lower back, bend your knees a little more.
Raise your head and shoulders off the ground slightly if you can to help keep the abs stressed.
The exercise itself has four phases:

Raise your legs until your feet are above your pelvis; focus on contracting the abs.
Thrust your heels to the ceiling, breathe out, keep contracting the abs raising the pelvis out of the cradle of your fists.
Lower out of the thrust back to your fists, leaving your feet above your pelvis.
Lower your legs back to the initial position.
Legendary Abs II recommends these as safer than Lying Leg Raises.

Hanging Knee Raises

You need a chin-up bar or something you can hang from for this. Grab the bar with both hands with a grip a bit wider than your shoulders, cross your ankles and bring your knees up to your chest (or as close as you can get). Your pelvis should rock slightly forward. Pause at the top of the movement for a second and then slowly lower your knees by relaxing your abs. Don’t lower your legs all the way. Repeat the movement using just your abs to raise your knees.

Make sure that you don’t start swinging. You want your abs to do the work, not momentum. It’s important that you don’t move your legs too far or your psoas muscle will be doing a lot of work and possibly causing back problems as in a situp.

Make sure your pelvis moves, your lower back stays neutral or slightly rounded, not arched, and that your abs are doing the work, not your hips.

Hanging Leg Raises

Just like knee raises except you keep your legs straight. This requires good hamstring and lower back flexibility.

Although Legendary Abs recommends these, The American Council on Exercise’s Aerobics Instructor book warns that they have the same back problems as conventional situps. This makes sense since, like situps, the legs are kept straight and the hips move. The Aerobics and Fitness Association of America (AFAA) also regards hanging leg raises as dangerous.

For safety you should probably stick to leg thrusts and knee raises.

If you do do hanging leg raises, make sure your lower back stays neutral or rounded.

There is an isometric variant done by gymnasts called the “L-Support”, which basically consists of taking the leg raise position with the legs held straight at a level just above the hips. The position is held for 10 seconds. When you can complete this easily, try a higher position. The same cautions about back position still hold.

Upper Ab Exercises

Ab Crunches

Lying on your back, put your knees up in the air so that your thighs are at a right angle to your torso, with your knees bent. If you like you can rest your feet on something, like a chair. Put your hands either behind your head or gently touching the sides of your head.

Now, slowly raise your shoulders off the ground and try to touch your breastbone to your pelvis, breathing out as you go. If you succeed in touching your breastbone to your pelvis, see a doctor immediately.

Although the actual movement will be very small (your upper torso should move through less than 30 degrees) you should try to go as high as possible. Only your spine should bend, your hips should not move. If the hips move, you are exercising the psoas.

Do these fairly slowly to avoid using momentum to help.

You can increase the difficulty of the exercise by extending your hands out behind your head instead of keeping them at the side. Make sure you don’t jerk your hands forward to help with the crunch, keep them still.

1/4 Crunches

Same as an ab crunch except that you raise your shoulder up, instead of pulling them toward your pelvis. You can do these quickly, in fact it’s hard to do them any other way.

Cross-Knee Crunches

Like ab crunches, take the lying, bent-knee position, but this time crunch diagonally so that you try to touch each shoulder to the opposite hip alternately. At the top position, one shoulder and one hip should be off the ground.

Pulldown Crunches

Drape a towel or rope around the bar of a pulldown machine so that you pull the weight using it instead of the bar. Kneel facing the machine and grab hold of the towel and put your hands against your forehead. Kneel far enough away from the machine so that the cable comes down at a slight angle.

The exercise is the same movement as an ab crunch, but using the weight instead of gravity. The emphasis is still on crunching the abs, pulling the sternum (breastbone) towards the pelvis and making sure you exhale all your air at each contraction.

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Q7: Is there a specific order I should do exercises in?
According to Legendary Abs, you should exercise the lower abs before the upper abs and do any twisting upper ab movements before straight upper ab ones. Twisting exercises work the obliques as well as the upper abs.

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Q8: How do I structure an ab routine?
According to the guidelines in Legendary Abs:

Try to do sets in the 15-30 rep range.
Follow the ordering rules in Question 7.
Pick easy exercises to start with and when you can happily do about 2 sets in a row of an exercise, try harder ones.
Only rest when you absolutely must, so take a short (10-15sec) rest between two sets of the same exercise, but none between lower and upper abs.
Try to take about 1 second for each rep, except for ab crunches which you do slower (2 secs/rep) for a better contraction and 1/4 crunches which you should do fast (2 reps/sec) because you’re hardly moving.

Best Abs Workout