GO Exercise

As we have learned, crunches are a great way to strengthen the complex and important muscles of the abdomen. Your efforts are concentrated to target precisely the crucial muscles needed for great muscle health and great good looks.

To get even better results from your exercising, it is a great idea to include a Bender Ball in your exercise program. The Bender Ball stabilizes the back and helps you to target the muscles that you need to work on. Studies show that including Bender Ball in your workout improves outcome as much as four times.

With crunches the back remains supported, either on the floor, or with an exercise ball like the Bender Ball as opposed to sit-ups where the back is actually lifted up off the floor.

Begin crunches by lying down on the floor on your back, with knees bent. You begin the crunch by curling in the shoulders toward the pelvis. Hands are kept behind the neck, or else crossed over the chest. Since pressing with force on the head or neck can cause injury it is a good idea to take care to not place the hands behind the head itself.

It is actually useful to create a type of shelf to rest the head in with your hands, to support the weight of the head so the neck flexor muscles are in a relaxed state during the exercise. There is no fear of injury to the neck as long as the neck is kept extended and the neck flexors remain relaxed, since the hands will not be putting extra force on the head.

Crunches are not only safer than sit-ups, but they work better to isolate the abdominal muscles for exercise, getting more effect from less effort. Since the hip flexors are used during sit-ups, some of the energy expended is used to contract the hips and the hip flexors in turn take away some of the movement from the abdominals.

Now that we are familiar with the anatomy of our abdominal muscles, we can talk with some understanding about how exercise can strengthen our muscles and make us healthier and feel better.

Many years ago sit-ups were the way people exercise their abdominal muscles. These are done by lying down with the back flat on the floor. Usually the knees are kept bent so to reduce stress on the muscles of the back and spine. Then the upper and lower vertebrae are lifted off the floor until everything above the buttocks is elevated off the floor. However, this exercise was found to be risky because of the high compressive load on the lumbar or lower spine. Nowadays, for the most part, sit-ups have been replaced by the “curl-up”, or crunch exercise.