(Not) Crunch Time

There are a fair number of misconceptions floating around out there about what our core muscles are and what they do and how we are supposed to work them.  I could write a very long post about that, but none of us has that kind of attention span.  Instead, I’m going to focus on one that I really dislike:  we can flatten our stomachs by doing crunches.  It’s a particularly sneaky misconception in that it is not entirely false, but definitely misleading. 

 

First of all, we cannot out-crunch a bad diet.  Doing a thousand crunches a day (and who has that kind of time?) will not help if we are living on Snickers bars and gravy.  The biggest step we can make toward a flatter stomach, if that is one of our goals, is to begin or recommit to healthy eating.

 

Second, crunches are not a good exercise for everyone.  Anyone with bone loss should avoid exercises with flexion (curving the spine forward, like we do when we bend over to tie our shoes).  Crunches can be challenging for people with low back pain as well.

 

Then there is the whole issue of form in crunches.  When we put our hands behind our heads and use our arms to yank our skulls forward, we are not getting the optimum bang for our exercise buck.  I teach crunches (which are called “chest lifts” in Pilates) very differently than many of us learned back in our P.E. days.  Yes, we put our hands behind our heads, but the only reason our heads lift when we do chest lifts is because they are attached to the top of our spines.  Instead, we focus on pulling our breast bones down toward our feet.  This focuses the work on the area of the abdominals just below where those of us who identify as female have our bra straps in the front.  Additionally, when we try to force ourselves up too high, our abdominals tend to puff out in the area between our navels and pubic bones.  It is important to take a moment to think about spreading the lower abdominals out across our bodies to encourage them to stay flat as we work them.  We also need to work with our breath when doing crunches:  we want to exhale as we curl up and inhale as we return to the starting position to allow for best recruitment of muscles.

 

Finally, crunches tend to focus on the upper abdominals.  We need a more comprehensive approach to our abdominals to assist our goal of flattening the stomach.  I suggest, at the very least, adding an exercise like femur arcs to target the lower abdominals and one like brains to recruit the obliques.

 

Let’s be effective.