Shannon | Sun December 07, 2008
Hi Anoop
I was doing lot more flexion exercises and lot less of extension and rotation exercises. I do the planks. Does that help?
Thaks
Shannon
How Many Ab Exercises should I do?
December 06 2008
From what I have seen, most people know plenty of different ab exercises. What is lacking in people’s ab routine is proper balance of different ab exercises so that you have equal emphasis on all the muscles in your trunk.
Anybody who hangs out in our ab area will see crunches and sit ups being the most dominant exercises in any ab routine.
Without proper muscle balance in your routine, you are setting yourself up for postural deviations, and maybe injury, in the long run.So how do you ensure proper muscle balance in your ab workout: A simple method is to divide your exercises to movements. The basic trunk movements are: Flexion, Extension, Side Flexion & Rotation.
Flexion
Flexion is basically rounding your back. Most ab exercises, like sit ups, crunches, sit ups with a ball, & leg raises fall in the flexion category. No muscle in the human body has endured so much torture and pain as the rectus abdominus (front ab muscle). And there is no end to it seems.
Tight abdominal muscle can pull your rib cage down and give you a hunch back posture which is common in many folks.
Extension
Extension works your lower back and is the opposite of flexion, as in leaning back or arching your back. Unfortunately, this movement is the most ignored in the gym. Functionally speaking, your low back is part of your trunk musculature. 85% of the adults end up with low back pain in their life. Strengthening your low back is one way to sneak into that 15%.
Side Flexion
Side flexion or Lateral Flexion involves side bending.
If you do one exercise for all the above movements, you covered every inch of every muscle in your trunk. If you need variey, and everyone does, do these movements in sitting, standing, lying, or hanging. Exercise variety is as easy as that.
Conclusion
- Your assignment is to divide your ab exercises into the above movements and see which movement is lacking and which is over emphasized.
- Add or subtract exercises or sets until you attain the right muscle balance, harmony, joy, and world peace.
Pic Coutesy: Maggie Thompson
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anoop | Thu December 11, 2008
Hi Shannon
I am not surprised. Most of the ab exercises in magazines are mainly flexion movemments. So you will see that a lot of those copied in the gyms too with no method or logic.
Good question. Plank is a stabilty exercise. The rest of the movemments we talked about are mobilty exercises. Means you are moving. The major function of the core is stabilty. It keeps your trunk stable when your limbs move around and help to transfer the force from your feet to your limbs. So planks are pretty functional.
I just didn’t want to include everything in there. I also didn’t include diagonal rotation. Even the flexion exercise works your internal and external obliques.
The article I wrote was for a newsletter. I try to dumb it down a lot and keep it short and to the point.
Hope it helps
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