The Best Abdominal Exercises
If you do a simple search for the best abdominal exercises, you will probably need a couple of hours to go through all the information because you will find hundreds.
Ironically, the experienced bodybuilders usually ignore this bullshit for a simple reason: they get superb results by using only a few basic exercises.
More than likely, your mid section receives a considerable amount of indirect work from your regular heavy training, so you could get a wicked set of abs without even doing a specific routine for this area (provided that your diet is set up properly).
As Arnold explains in his Encyclopedia, essentially, all "best abdominal exercises" should be a kind of crunch. In other words, when these muscles contract, they pull the rib cage and pelvis toward each other in a short “crunching” movement.
When this happens, the abs are contracting full range, and the spine is rounding forward. And this, my friend, is the “big secret” of the isolation training for abs.
It's important to note that some common exercises such as situps or leg raises (or their variations) don't follow this simple pattern, and for this reason the abdominal muscles are not fully contracted – they act more as stabilizers rather then being properly isolated.
If you don't believe me, try the following experiment: Stand up, find something to hold on with one hand, and raise a leg in front of you while touching your abs with the other hand. You will feel a tension at the top of the thigh, but the abdominal muscles will be fairly relaxed.
In fact, they don't have much to do with lifting the leg because they are not attached to it (they are attached to the pelvis).
By the same token, the same holds true for the situp, which is just the reverse of the leg raise. (Regular situps also seem to compress the lower back, and rub your tailbone raw.)
When doing crunches, for optimum results hold each crunch at the finish of each rep (when your head and pelvis are both off the floor) for a moment and squeeze the abs.
In fact, what most people call a crunch is only a partial situp because the pelvis don't move from the floor.
If your shoulders are not on the floor, you will not be able to lift your pelvis, and get a true crunch effect to your abs. This is a precise ab exercise, and focuses mainly on the uppermost row of abdominals, those attached to the ribcage.
What about doing crunches on a Swill ball? Some experts claim that training on an unstable surface is a more efficient way to strengthen the core musculature, but honestly I was never able to understand the rationale behind these stupid allegations.
It's common sense that uni-planar isolation core exercises with high levels of stability equate with higher levels of fiber activation. You can focus more on your exercise (and therefore on muscular contraction) rather than on how to avoid falling from the ball.
The only benefit of these new school exercises is learning a skill that you don't really need – unless you have a pervert girlfriend who has weird fantasies.
In conclusion, the best abdominal exercises, and the only ones that you will ever need, are actually two: normal and reverse crunches. (If you get bored, you can replace both of them with leg tucks.)
It's worth mentioning that at this point there is no conclusive data showing that lower and upper abs should be trained with two different exercises, but there is a lot of empiric evidence that these areas can be indeed separated.
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