Why Crunches & Situps Are Bad for Your Back

Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.

John Quincy Adams

There are still a lot of people who spend hours in the gym doing crunches. It has been proven that the two standard ab exercises, crunches and sit-ups, can actually be murder on your low back (when done excessively).

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. Not to mention about people doing them incorrectly and using their hip flexor – when the hip flexor gets overused, it will get tide and puts extra stress on the lumbar spine – or pulling themselves up by tugging on their head which puts extra stress on their neck!

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. Exercises such as squats, dead-lifts or functional training are crucial for strong abs.

4) Crucial is to understand your food intake and having a solid nutritional plan.

For advanced training methods, 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! Abs are made in the kitchen and not during sit-ups!

I do not think there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance. It overcomes almost everything, even nature.

John D. Rockefeller