Weight Loss Spotlight

Ab Crunch & Firm Stomach

Ab Crunches for a Firm, Tight Stomach!

To achieve a firm set of ab muscles, you need to be consistent with your stomach exercises. You can always finish your workout in the gym with a couple of different ab exercises. No matter how exhausted the rest of your body is, you can more then likely still train your abs in the end of the training session. Your ab muscles are the center of your body and constantly work to hold your whole body up hence their enormous strength.

There are numerous ab exercises that will tone, shape and strengthen your ab muscles but one of the more effective ones are ab crunches. They can be performed on the floor, with the legs on a bench, hanging, or on a stability ball.

The most important part to remember no matter where they take place is to use the ab muscles to bring your legs and knees up to your torso and not let the hip flexor muscles do the work.

If you perform ab crunches on the floor, keep you lower back on the floor at all times, support your neck with your hands and slowly bring your hips to your ribs by contracting your ab muscles, shortening the distance between the upper and lower body while bringing your knees to your chest.

In the negative phase of the exercise going back to the starting position, keep your ab muscles contracted and resist letting your legs just fall to the floor in order to achieve full range of motion. Focus on keeping the lower back on the floor.

The usual rule of performing three sets of fifteen repetitions in resistance training exercises do not apply to ab exercises. This muscle group can handle a lot more then the other muscle groups and consequently need more repetitions to reach point of exhaustion. Four to five sets of 20-25 repetitions seem to be a more sufficient number to try to enforce when exercising your ab muscles.

The crunching movement can be performed by crunching your upper body towards your lower body keeping your legs in a 90 degree bent position with your feet placed on a bench or box, lifting your shoulder blades off floor while supporting your neck in your hands. Or it can be done reverse by lifting your bent legs towards your chest using the ab muscles to bring your legs to your chest.

Either way it's done, the focus should be only on the abs. The more advanced version is the oblique crunch that is based upon the same biomechanical movement but performed using only your side ab muscles, the obliques.

This exercise can be done either on the floor or in a roman chair or hanging from a steady bar. The oblique muscle requires a cross over movement to be exercised. Let the opposite elbow and the knee meet on top when crunching up and across, alternating left and right. These cross over crunches work the same way for your side ab muscles as the crunches for your straight ab muscles do. You can alternate a set of straight crunches with a set of oblique crunches to get a complete ab workout covering all the different stomach muscles at once.

The same rule goes for the oblique muscles as for the regular crunches when it comes to how many sets and repetitions you should do to get the best results.

If you can do more then four sets of twenty five repetitions, you might consider to hold a plate of 5 or 10 lbs in front of you on your chest while crunching to add more resistance to the exercise.

Despite cutting-edge ab training techniques, such as the ab crunch or the ab leg raise, all the ab crunches in the world won't bring you to the objective of lean, firm and sexy abs without eating the right weight loss food. Preferably, the en vogue low carb diet methods of today's latest diet craze are actually extremely effective, but do not neglect other aspects of nutrition, especially whey protein.

And, that's all she wrote!