5 Reasons Ab Exercises Are WORTHLESS

May 3, 2009 · Filed Under Getting 6 Pack Abs · Comment 

In my opinion, many of the most popular ab exercises are absolutely 100% worthless. And keep in mind I’m talking about ab exercises that the general public does such as crunches and situps.

You see, many people think that if they do 1,000 crunches per day – they’re going to get ripped abs you can see through your shirt. But that’s not the way it happens! Ab exercises like that are usually worthless and there are many other alternatives.

So let’s get going:

  1. Causes Injury – It’s not necessarily that the motion of the exercise causes injury, it’s that most people don’t take the time to truly learn how to do crunches and situps the RIGHT way, and it leads to injury in the lower back. For example when you’re at the top of a situp/crunch – are you looking straight ahead of you? If so, you’re doing it completely wrong. I’ll have a video in the future of the correct way to do this.
  2. Muscle Imbalances – Because people think their abs are the most important thing in the world, they often neglect their lower back. Doing this causes pulls and imbalances in the body – which again leads to injuries. This is one of the main causes of lower back pain among people who workout.
  3. Waste Of Time – There are many exercises in which you can train your entire core (which is the way it’s supposed to be trained) instead of just isolating your ab muscles through ab exercises that specifically train your abs. Doing this not only helps eliminate muscle imbalances, but core exercises usually work them better anyway. Some exercises like this would include ab wheel rollouts, 1 legged squats (which KILL your core), front squats, V-ups, and a few others.
  4. Not Functional – Although many people argue that “everything” is functional because it strengthens your body, I’ve been on both sides of this fence and I can tell you that doing what people call “functional” exercises – exercises that train your body as a unit instead of individual muscles – makes a big difference in the way you can move your body throughout the day.

  5. Don’t Burn As Many Calories – Isolating muscle groups doesn’t result in the good ole’ flood of hormones in your body like multi-joint exercises do. It also takes less energy to do the exercises, so it burns less calories.

I’ll be honest – sometimes I go weeks at a time without doing ANY ab exercises. Why? Because most of the time I’m doing a lot of bodyweight and multi-joint exercises, and I’ve literally gotten my abs sore just from doing exercises that indirectly use my abs.

Here are a few of the exercises I do that also kill my abs at the same time:

1 legged squats

1 armed pushups

Rope climbing

Tire flipping

Deadlifts

Front Squats

….and that’s just to name a few (I didn’t wanna make a huge list).

So as you can see, ab exercises are worthless! You should focus more on doing multi-joint exercises which burn more calories and burn fat faster. And as you know, the more fat you burn, the leaner you get. And the leaner you get, the more your abs pop out!

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