Sit ups, The Good, Bad and The Ugly

By reading this article, I hope you will have an understanding of why doing sit ups or crunches is not the best way to train your abdominals. I will go into detail about why the sit up is not a great exercise and explain which exercises are better and why?

The stomach muscles have caused much confusion among the human race over the years. No one seems to know how to achieve a six pack, and the ones that do have a six pack, don't seem to know how or why they have these nice muscles on their stomach.

I'm going to start in reverse order going through the best ways NOT to get a six pack.

1. Do hundreds of sit ups every day
2. Hold extra weight and do sit ups
3. Use vibration pads on your abs

It should be fairly obvious that I am trying to discourage you from doing lots of sit ups. I will explain exactly why and suggest several much better ways to train your abdominal muscles. Here goes…

When you lie on the ground and complete a full sit up, many muscles have to contract to allow you to flex your spine and sit up. Two of the main muscles that have to contract to allow this are the rectus abdominus, (the stomach muscles) the psoas major and illiacus (the hip flexors).

If you do lots of sit ups, you are more than likely to be exercising the hip flexor muscles (the psoas major and the illiacus) and not the stomach muscles!

Over time, if you do a lot of sit ups, your hip flexor muscles will become strong and short because every time you crunch up to do a sit up you have to contract (shorten) the hip flexors aswell as the stomach muscles. Eventually, you will get to the point where the stomach muscles have to do very little to complete a full sit up, defeating the point of the exercise. Aswell as the hip flexor muscles becoming short and strong having done loads of sit ups, you stomach muscles will also become short, and this is not a good thing!

If you have short stomach muscles (which most people who work at a desk do) the front of your hips may be pulled forward, unnecessarily stressing the lower back. A lot of lower back pain is caused by short and tight muscles pulling down on the hips. Sit ups is not an exercise you want to be doing too much of for exactly that reason.

If you stand up and bend over with your hands on your stomach muscles, you will be able to feel them shortening to allow the bend. This is exactly what is happening when you do a sit up; you are shortening your abdominals!

To summarise, sit ups will…

1. Shorten and strengthen your hip flexor muscles
2. Shorten your abdominal muscles
3. Eventually have very little impact on your stomach muscles because your hip flexors muscles have become so strong.

You should be wondering which exercises allow you to train your abdominals effectively. The key is to lengthen them (unlike the sit up) whilst stressing them enough to force them to get stronger and leaner, thus improving the definition!

Think 'plank' exercises!

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