Abdominal Crunches

I've mentioned on one of my posts that if you cannot lose weight, work on your abs and I would like to add a few more information about training your abdominals. For an abdominal training to produce effective results for your body, it should put emphasize on crunching movement of your torso. Therefore, the easiest accessible exercise for you is traditional crunches. To do a basic abdominal crunch, you have to lie down on your back with your feet either on a bench or just put them up in the air for more abdominal resistance and then roll up your upper body my tensing your abdominal muscles. By simply doing the very basic abdominal crunch, you can increase and define the mass of your abdominal muscles. As you develop your abdominal strength through doing ab crunches, you will want to add more intensity into it by putting your feet up on a bench or on a concrete wall. While the upper portion of your abs tend to do most of the work while crunching, the lower portion of your abs does its work by maintaining the stability of your trunk by contracting.

So much for the basic crunch, and let's move on to reverse crunches. The reverse crunch unlike the normal abdominal crunch emphasizes the work on the lower part of the abdominals. This crunch also utilizes the weight of the legs to put resistance on the movement. To perform this exercise, start off by lying on your back with your arms lying on the side of your body. While lying, bend your knees then raise your thighs contracting the lower part of your abdominal muscles. Inhale as you tense your muscles then hold them up for a few seconds then release your breath as you release the tensing on your abs. As you do this, make sure that you keep your knees close to your chest and your pelvis should come off the floor every time your raise your legs. This exercise also help shred off the belly hanging on the lower part of your abs which is usually the cause why most people cannot lose weight efficiently.

Another variation for reverse crunch is the hanging leg raise, the movement is very similar to reverse crunch, the only difference is that you do it while hanging on to a pull bar. To start doing this exercise, simply hang on to a pull bar then raise your legs contracting the lower part of your abdominal muslces similar to how you would execute a reverse crunch.