Abdominal crunches are common in many workouts, but doing them correctly is key for results. This article clarifies the technique and guides you to perform crunches effectively.
Benefits of Doing Abdominal Crunches Correctly
Abdominal crunches are popular for home and gym workouts. Done right, they tone your abs.
- Burn excess fat and build muscle.
- Support increased abdominal muscle strength, improve body mobility, and improve posture.
- Reduce joint and spinal pain.
- Help tone the body and create a strong, toned abdominal shape.
How to Do Abdominal Crunch Correctly for Effective Fat Reduction
Abdominal crunches significantly impact the spine. Therefore, incorrect posture during crunches can compress nerves, causing spinal pain and even leading to other serious injuries. Abdominal crunches are relatively simple, but the most important thing is to master the technique to perform them correctly, avoiding potential injuries. To perform the exercise, you can follow these instructions:
- Start by lying on your back on a mat, with your hands behind your head, your thumbs resting lightly behind your ears, elbows pointing outwards, and your legs bent, feet flat on the floor, hip-width apart.
- Push your back down to the floor, tighten your abdominal muscles while inhaling, and slowly lift your head and shoulders off the mat to a sufficient height without arching your back while exhaling. Note that you should only use your abdominal muscles to lift your shoulders, not your arms.
- When raising your shoulders to the highest position, hold this position for a few seconds. Then, continue to tighten your abdominal muscles to slowly lower yourself back to the starting position, inhaling as you do so.
- This exercise can be performed in 4 sets, with a maximum of 15 repetitions per set.
Notes when performing the crunch exercise:
Crunches are a basic exercise, very simple to perform, but many people still easily make mistakes, leading to soreness after exercise or long-term training without achieving results. Therefore, to do crunches correctly, you need to note:
- Before performing crunches, you need to warm up and stretch your body for about 5-10 minutes.
- The rest time between sets for abdominal muscles is shorter than for other muscle groups, only about 30 seconds.
- For the crunch exercise, you should only raise your shoulders about 7-10cm from the mat (creating an angle of about 30-40 degrees with the mat). This helps minimise injuries during the exercise.
- Breathing technique also plays a crucial role in sit-ups. The principle is to exhale when raising your shoulders and inhale when returning to the starting position. In reality, many people breathe incorrectly or hold their breath while doing sit-ups, leading to oxygen deprivation.
- Another important note is that when doing sit-ups, you should only lightly place your hands behind your head, not interlock your fingers. Interlocking your fingers can put pressure on your neck, causing injury and neck pain.
- If you are new to sit-ups, you should rest for a day after each workout to allow your body time to recover.
- After you get used to sit-ups, you should increase the intensity of your workout, possibly incorporating weights to stimulate stronger muscle growth.
- During sit-up training, you need to combine it with a nutritious diet to improve your physical fitness.
Suggestions for some variations of sit-ups
The sit-up instructions above are considered the most basic sit-up exercise. However, in reality, there are many variations of sit-ups, some even more effective than the basic exercise. To diversify your workout, you can try some of the following sit-up variations:
Occlusion sit-ups
Occlusion sit-ups are considered an advanced version of the basic sit-up. However, this exercise is only for those who are already familiar with the basic exercise, where the strength of the abdominal muscles and the entire body has been significantly increased. If performed correctly, this sit-up variation is very good for the oblique muscles, helps burn excess fat, and helps you achieve a slimmer waist.
How to perform:
- Start in a side-lying position on a mat, with your right leg on top of your left leg, and your left arm placed alongside your body or touching your head like your right arm.
- Raise your right arm and head as high as possible while contracting your oblique muscles.
- Lower back to the starting position and repeat the movement about 15 times, then switch to the other side.
Reverse Crunches
Reverse crunches are also a variation of the abdominal crunch exercise commonly used to reduce lower belly fat. Although this exercise isn’t too difficult, you need to pay attention to the correct posture to achieve the desired results.
How to perform:
- Start the exercise lying on your back on a mat, with your legs straight and your arms straight along your sides, palms facing down. In this exercise, remember to keep your arms straight throughout the movement.
- Raise your thighs perpendicular to the mat, keeping your feet together, and your shins parallel to the floor.
- Inhale and lift your hips off the mat while raising your legs, toes pointing towards the ceiling. Hold the position at the maximum crunch for a few seconds, then slowly lower your legs back to the starting position while exhaling.
- Repeat this crunch about 15 times per set.
Cycle Crunches
This crunch variation gives you the feeling of cycling in the air. The movements involve the abdominal, arm, and leg muscles. Therefore, performing the bicycle crunch variation is very effective in reducing belly fat, strengthening the waist, and slimming the arms and legs.
How to perform:
- Start the exercise lying on your back on a mat, hands behind your head, and do not put pressure on your neck and nape.
- Raise your legs so that your thighs are perpendicular to the mat and your shins are parallel to the mat, lifting your shoulders to get into a crunch position.
- Perform the cycling motion by kicking your right leg forward and bringing your left knee in. Bring your right elbow close to your left knee by bending to the side while exhaling.
- Continue by switching sides and performing about 15 repetitions per set.
V-Crunches
V-crunches are suitable for both men and women. When performed correctly, they effectively reduce belly fat, thigh fat, and arm fat.
How to perform:
- Start the exercise lying on a flat surface, with your arms extended straight behind your head so that your body forms a straight line.
- Exhale and contract your waist, simultaneously raising your arms and legs to form a V shape, keeping your buttocks on the surface as support. In this movement, remember to keep your legs straight, forming an angle of about 35-40 degrees with the ground, your arms parallel to your legs, and your upper body off the ground.
- Inhale and slowly lower your arms and legs back to the starting position, then repeat this movement about 10-15 times.
Ball Crunch
The Ball Crunch is an abdominal exercise using a ball. This exercise is often included in the training schedules of fitness trainers. To perform this abdominal exercise, you need the support of a gym ball.
How to perform:
- Start the exercise lying on your back on the exercise ball, knees bent and feet flat on the ground. Place your hands loosely behind your head, and lower your body while keeping your neck fixed.
- Keep your hips fixed, lower back always touching the ball, contract your abdominal muscles and curl your torso and shoulders upwards until you feel a contraction in your abdominal muscles as you exhale. Hold the highest abdominal contraction position for about 1 second.
- Inhale and return to the starting position. Repeat this movement about 15 times per set.
The article above has helped you better understand the abdominal crunch exercise, its benefits, and how to do it correctly. Hopefully, through this article, you will learn how to do abdominal crunches correctly to achieve the best results. However, if you want to see results as quickly as possible, in addition to abdominal crunches, you should also combine them with other exercises following a specific and scientific plan. This will help you lose weight more comprehensively.