Are Sit-ups a Bad Abdominal Exercise?

Sit-ups: A bad Abdominal Exercise?

Yes, it's true. The so-called "gold-standard" in ab exercises can actually be murder on your low back.

Why?

Because sit-ups involve spinal flexion (rounding your lower back to allow you to bend forward at the waist). And 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, right? And that is another example of spinal flexion.

So it makes sense to limit the amount of traditional sit-ups and even 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.

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 one of the 20 ab exercises in the 6-Month Bodyweight Training Manual, or following the specific core workouts from the TT for Fat Loss Special Report.

The ball rollout, pictured above, is just one of the many ab exercises that can be done at home without fancy machines, that doesn't put your back at risk like the situp.

3) Keep your abs braced in all exercises so that you work your abs in every movement that you do.

Train hard but safe,

CB

P.S. Turbulence Training is the best route to 6-pack abs...
There are dozens of isolation ab exercises that you can do without rounding your back - like you would in a sit-up. And more importantly, you can build your abs with each and every exercise you do if you use the directions and exercises in Turbulence Training.

"Craig, your body weight training manual is phenomenal. So many guys think that lifting weights is the only way to get lean and strong, while mistakenly thinking that body weight work is easy-this product proves them wrong on both counts. Best of all, it's not what people might expect. There's a lot more to it than pushups and situps. You've created a full-body program that beats boredom as well as it builds muscle fast."
Sean Hyson, fitness editor for Men's Fitness and Muscle & Fitness Hers

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sit-ups, abdominal exercise