How Training Your Abs Affects Your Posture:

In addition to being very inefficient for training your abdominals, situps and crunches can also hurt your posture. In your quest to get 6 pack abs, you may be wrecking your posture and your spine at the same time.

In past talks on posture, I've told you about the need for balance between the muscles on the front and back of your body. When your body is in balance, you can stand up straight and move more efficiently. This efficiency also puts the least amount of stress on your joints, as your muscles are providing the proper amount of support.

When you spend 10-15 minutes on the floor doing situps, you are training your body in a flexed position. Since you never see someone work the opposite muscles (low back) for an equal amount of time, you throw off this balance. Since most people already have a tendency to be in a flexed position, due to the amount of time we spend sitting, this further throws off your postural balance.

So, besides being inefficient because they take too long to do, crunches and situps can also cause low back pain. When you do repeated flexion exercises your discs are prone to injury. So to protect your low back and reinforce good posture, you should do most of your abs training in a neutral position. Various bridges and planks on the floor are one way to do this.

The other is to train your abs and low back at the same time you work your upper and lower body. For example, doing upper body exercises that require your midsection to provide stability for your spine. Resistance band exercises that use a pulling or pushing move will build strength in your abs. Dumbbell swings, squats, and presses will also strengthen them.

All the situps or crunches in the world won't cause you to burn away your belly fat, despite what the TV commercials lead you to believe. You need to use exercises that involve multiple muscles such as squats, lunges, presses, and pulls. The more muscles involved leads to more calories burned, provided you are working intensely enough.

Exercise machines for the abs, whether at the gym or home, aren't needed. If at home, dumbbells, resistance bands, sandbags and your own bodyweight is all that is needed. If you want something at home to help burn more calories, a decent bike will work. Then you would do interval training for greater fat loss.

Your abs have different layers of muscles running at different angles, similar to plywood. This layering effect is what gives them their strength. Trying to isolate them with different crunches doesn't strengthen them properly and may lead to posture problems, over time.