Ab Crunch
How to Do Gorilla Crunches That Will Get Your Abs Ripped
Ab Crunches
This compound exercise helps build strength as you elevate your lower body from a hanging position with the use of your abdominals. You will be hanging on a chin up bar with your feet suspended while doing this exercise. The gorilla crunches will also help train your biceps and lats as you execute the exercise.
Hold the chin up bar with your palms facing towards you. Space your hands so that it is a bit wider than your shoulders. Let your arms remain straight. Your legs should behind you in a 90? angle at the knees. Your thighs are perpendicular to the floor and your calves are maintained in a parallel position. Cross your feet at the ankles to stabilize your legs. Head, neck, back, and hips should be in a straight line. This will be your starting position.
Exhale as you simultaneously pull yourself up on the bar with your abdominals pulling your legs at chest level. Keep your knees bent and your ankles locked during the execution. Your end point should be with your nose at the level of the bar and your knees at your chest. Inhale as you go back to starting position.
Keep your abdominals tight and contracted throughout the exercise. You should be using them to lift your knees and legs to your chest to isolate the motion in your abdominals. For an advanced form of training, you can use a medicine ball or dumbbells between your feet. Once you have reached the expert level, you can do a one-arm pull-up with your other hand wresting on your wrist if you wish to target your oblique muscles.
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Abdominal Workout
Top 10 Abdominal Exercises You Need To Do
- Abdominal Exercise Workout
Although most people continue to rely on exercises like sit ups and crunches when it comes to training the abdominals, research has proven that these movements place excessive loads on the lower back, leading to a lot of pain for a lot of people. Repeated, loaded spinal flexion is one of the leading causes for disc herniation.
In fact, the traditional old school, slow speed sit up has been shown to place 730 pounds of compression on the spine! Other commonly used ab exercises place over 1,000 pounds of compression on the spine!
Boy, do I wish I knew all this in my teens and early 20′s when I did thousands of spinal flexion exercises per week, eventually leading to two herniated discs.
Not only are you risking long term back problems by doing all those sit ups, crunches, and all their useless variations but you are not even providing optimal stimulus to the abdominals. Research has proven that bracing actually trains the abs much more effectively than spinal flexion.
To properly employ this technique you need to brace your abs as hard as you can like you are preparing to take a punch. You don’t push your abs out and you don’t suck them in. In fact, sucking them in and trying to activate your transverse abdominis is one of the worst things you can do.
You simply want to tighten and flex the abs as hard as possible. Be sure that there are no energy leaks and that your entire core is braced tightly. You can have a partner poke you or lightly whack you with a stick from different angles to ensure optimal bracing.
Never in real life will you consciously flex your spine and contract your abs like you do in a crunch, so why bother doing it in the gym? If you are on your back in most athletic endeavors, it’s usually because someone put you there. It’s usually not where you want to be. So why try to train your abs in that position?
Starting today, you are going to stop wasting your time and destroying your lower back with traditional ab training and instead focus your energy on the exercises listed below and their many variations. Read more
