Avoiding Mistakes When Training Your Abdominals

Mistakes are so common with abdominal exercises that the crunch has the dubious honor of qualifying for a spot in as one of the exercises most often performed incorrectly.
Here’s a close look at abdominal training no-nos:

• Avoid doing neck-ups. In other words, lift from your abs, not your neck; otherwise, you’re asking for neck pain. Your head and neck shouldn’t be involved in abdominal exercises at all — they’re just along for the ride. Place your hands behind your head without lacing your fingers together, slide your shoulders down, and tilt your chin slightly so there’s about a fist’s worth of space between your chin and your chest. Your head and neck need to stay in this position throughout the exercise.
  
• Don’t move your elbows. Your elbows have nothing to do with abdominal exercises. After you position your elbows out and slightly rounded inward, leave them there. If you pull your elbows up and in, you’ll end up pulling on your neck.
• Don’t arch or flatten your back. We frequently remind you to pull your abs in, but always keep a slight gap, the width of a finger or two, between the small of your back and the floor. Avoid squeezing your buttocks and jamming your lower back into the floor.
• After the lift, don’t forget the curl. The crunch involves more than simply lifting your head, neck, and shoulder blades off the floor; you also need to curl forward, as if you’re doubling over. Imagine how you’d move if you were lying on the floor and someone dropped a weight on your stomach. That’s the movement you’re aiming for here.

Avoiding Mistakes When Training Your Abdominals

Mistakes are so common with abdominal exercises that the crunch has the dubious honor of qualifying for a spot in as one of the exercises most often performed incorrectly.
Here’s a close look at abdominal training no-nos:

• Avoid doing neck-ups. In other words, lift from your abs, not your neck; otherwise, you’re asking for neck pain. Your head and neck shouldn’t be involved in abdominal exercises at all — they’re just along for the ride. Place your hands behind your head without lacing your fingers together, slide your shoulders down, and tilt your chin slightly so there’s about a fist’s worth of space between your chin and your chest. Your head and neck need to stay in this position throughout the exercise.
  
• Don’t move your elbows. Your elbows have nothing to do with abdominal exercises. After you position your elbows out and slightly rounded inward, leave them there. If you pull your elbows up and in, you’ll end up pulling on your neck.
• Don’t arch or flatten your back. We frequently remind you to pull your abs in, but always keep a slight gap, the width of a finger or two, between the small of your back and the floor. Avoid squeezing your buttocks and jamming your lower back into the floor.
• After the lift, don’t forget the curl. The crunch involves more than simply lifting your head, neck, and shoulder blades off the floor; you also need to curl forward, as if you’re doubling over. Imagine how you’d move if you were lying on the floor and someone dropped a weight on your stomach. That’s the movement you’re aiming for here.

Myths of Abdominal Workouts

To design an effective abdominal program, you need to separate the hype from the truth. Forget everything you may have found out from TV infomercials. Here we debunk the remarkably persistent myths about abdominal training.

Myth #1: Abdominal exercises get rid of the blubber around your middle
Reality: Ab exercises can’t help you “go from flab to abs,” as many infomercials claim, because flab and abs are separate entities. Abdominal exercises strengthen and tone your muscles, but these muscles lie underneath the layer of fat on top. Spot reducing through toning exercise is a fantasy. The only way to lose your belly fat is to eat less and exercise more — a strategy that reduces your overall body fat. However, even then you have no guarantee that you will lose the fat from your middle.

Myth #2: Everyone can develop washboard abs if they try hard enough
Reality: Even if you make it your life’s mission to eat a low-fat diet, spend hours a day on the StairMaster, and perform abdominal exercises to utter perfection, you still may not develop that rippled look unless your body is genetically programmed to carry almost no fat in the abdominal area. And very few of us are built that way.

Myth #3: For best results, you should do several hundred repetitions of abdominal exercises
Reality: Treat your abs like any other muscle group; in other words, perform 8 to 15 repetitions per set to fatigue for optimal strength and endurance conditioning. To focus on endurance training for the abs, do more reps — up to 24 — to fatigue. If you can do more than this, you’re either doing the exercise incorrectly or you’re performing an exercise that’s too easy for you. Either way, you’re not doing your abs much good.

Myth #4: You need to work your abs every day
Reality: Again, your abdominals are like every other muscle group. They respond best to hard work followed by a day of rest. Overtraining your abs simply invites neck and lower back problems, not to mention boredom. Strength training for your abs, however, is different from endurance training for the core.

Myth #5: The front of your stomach has two separate muscles: The upper abs and lower abs
Reality: The rectus abdominis is one long, flat, continuous sheet of muscle. Any abdominal crunch exercise works the entire muscle, although lifting your upper body off the floor emphasizes the upper portion of the rectus, and lifting your hips off the floor emphasizes the lower portion. When you do ab exercises slowly and with perfect form, you feel the entire muscle working no matter what exercise you do.

Myth #6: You need a gadget to train your abs
Reality: Although ab roller-type contraptions help novices understand the crunch movement, the floor works as well as or better than any device, and last time we checked, the floor was free. Besides, exercises such as the ones shown in this chapter are more challenging and versatile than those performed with a gadget. We’re not fond of health club abdominal machines, either. Most of them strengthen your back and hips more than they do your abs.

Myth #7: Sit-ups are better than crunches
Reality: With any sit-up-type movement, your abdominals are involved only in the first part of the motion. After your shoulders clear the floor, your hip flexor and lower back muscles take over. So there’s no point in sitting all the way up to your knees.

Enjoying Strong Abdominals

Abdominal exercises won’t eliminate fat around your midsection, but abdominal exercises serve you in many other important ways.

• Real-life benefits: Your abs play a crucial behind-the-scenes role in your daily life, supporting your spine in all of your movements. For instance, as you’re sitting here reading this book, you probably think your abs have very little to do. In fact, they’re the reason you sit up reasonably straight in your chair, as opposed to oozing off the edge like a blob of Jell-O. Your abs are even more important when you perform more complicated movements. Strong abs enable you to stand in line or shovel dirt in your garden for a lot longer without getting a backache.
  
• Injury prevention: Most back pain can be reduced — perhaps even eliminated — by strengthening the abdominal muscles along with the lower back muscles and the buttocks. All of your abdominals work together to support and move your spine. The most common way people injure their back is when they combine bending with rotation, especially during lifting. Strong muscles and proper movement habits prevent this and other injuries.
• The “Feel Good” factor: The notion of washboard abs creates a great deal of anxiety and insecurity among many individuals. Unless you have the genetics to not store fat above your rectus abdominus muscle, the tone of your abdominals, no matter how fit you are, will show directly under your skin. Models and celebrities often have this fat vacuumed out through liposuction to reveal the muscularity underneath or they have airbrush contour tans sprayed on to give the appearance of ‘cut’ abs. Feel good about yourself from simply knowing that you have strong abdominal muscles, regardless of whether the world can see them or not.

Abdominal Muscle Basics

At this point, every household in America probably knows that the abdominal muscles are collectively referred to as the abs. Keep in mind that your abs aren’t just in front of your body but wrap around your body. This fact is important in training because many people only seem to be concerned with training what they see — the front and center — but your abs cover much more of your body.
You have four abdominal muscles:

• Rectus abdominis: This is the largest abdominal muscle and runs from your breastbone to your pubic bone, a few inches below your belly button. The rectus abdominis

1. Curls your spine forward when performing crunches (or when you double over with laughter from watching Desperate Housewives).
2. Keeps your spine still when you move other parts of your body, such as when you lift a heavy box off the floor.

• Obliques, internal and external: These muscles run diagonally up and down your sides. Your obliques

1. Help your rectus abdominis curl your spine forward.
2. Enable you to twist and bend to the side.
3. Provide lower back support.

• Transversus abdominis: The transversus abdominis sits directly beneath the rectus abdominis and is the deepest of all your abdominal muscles. This muscle

1. Is continuously working when you’re sitting and standing.
2. Helps support your lower back and keep good posture.

Wrist curl and reverse wrist curl

The wrist curl and reverse wrist curl are great for strengthening your wrist muscles.
Be careful if you’ve had wrist or elbow problems.

Wrist curl
Hold a weight in your right hand with an underhand grip, and sit on the edge of your bench with your knees as wide as your hips. Lean slightly forward, and place your entire forearm on top of your thigh so your hand hangs over the edge of your knee. Clasp your left palm over your wrist to hold it steady (see photo A). Curl your wrist up so the dumbbell moves toward your forearm, and then lower the weight back down.

Reverse wrist curl
Turn your palm down, and, again, secure your wrist in place with your other hand. Bend your wrist up to raise the dumbbell to thigh height (see photo B), and then lower the weight back down. (Hint: You may need slightly less weight to do the reverse wrist curl.)

Do’s and don’ts

• DO curl straight up; try to avoid moving the weight to the side.
• DON’T let your forearm lift off your thigh.

Other options

• Modified wrist curl: If you have weak wrists and find this exercise difficult, simply move the weight up and down a shorter distance.
• Wrist-and-finger curl (harder): At the bottom of the wrist curl, roll the weight down to the tips of your fingers and then roll it back before curling the weight up. This exercise is excellent for typists or others who use their hands a lot because it strengthens the forearms and prevents carpal tunnel syndrome.

Triceps dip machine

The triceps dip machine targets your triceps and, to some extent, your shoulder and chest muscles.
Take special care if you have shoulder, elbow, or neck problems.

Getting set
Set the seat height so that when your arms are fully bent, your elbows are at or below chest level. Sit in the seat with your feet flat on the floor. If the machine has a seat belt, wear it to prevent you from popping up out of the seat while you do the exercise. Grasp a handle in each hand so your elbows are bent and your palms are facing in. Pull your abdominals in and sit with your back, buttocks, and shoulder blades against the back support. See photo A.

The exercise
Press the handles down until your arms are straight but your elbows remain relaxed (see photo B). Slowly bend your arms until your elbows are up near chest height.

Do’s and don’ts

• DO keep your shoulders relaxed instead of hunching them up near your ears.
• DO keep your wrists in line with your forearm instead of bending them outward.
• DON’T slam your arms or lock your elbows.

Other options

• Different grips: Most triceps dip machines have the option of a narrow or a wide grip. Start with the wide grip because you’re more likely to use correct form. However, when you become more proficient with this machine, the inside grip does an excellent job of isolating the triceps muscles.
• Modified triceps dip machine: You can raise the seat higher to restrict the distance your arms travel. This variation is an excellent option for those with neck and shoulder problems because the raised seat keeps you from raising your arms as high and ensures that the neck and shoulders won’t be hunched and tight.
• Triceps extension machine: Some gyms have a triceps extension machine rather than a triceps dip machine. The extension machine works the muscles the same way except that you start with your arms at shoulder height with your elbows resting on a pad; then you press the handles, straightening your arms out in front of you instead of downward.