How To Do Crunches: An All-Inclusive Guide

Besides building abs, crunches also provide stability and balance to the body. They give strength to the muscles too. The crunches’ main target is the rectus abdominis muscle and the quads (in the bicycle crunches)—moreover, these crunches aid in reducing body fat and reduce your weight.

Now, doing crunches will be a boon for the body, as is evident from the number of benefits of crunches highlighted above. Thus, we will be discussing the best and proper way to do the crunches, as doing this exercise wrong can make you pull a muscle or two, which can be painful. Therefore, this exercise must be done correctly.

The instructions provided below are for the very basic type of crunches. In my opinion, you should start by practising the basic crunches and then move on to the other tough ones.

1. Start by is lying down on the floor, looking up towards the ceiling.
2. Your legs should be bent from the knees and hands should be clasped together at the back of the neck. This helps you support your neck and head. This aids in preventing any injury from stretching the neck too hard.
3. You can also place your hands crossed over your chest, and some people find this posture easier to hold than the one mentioned above.
4. Now, tighten your abs area by pulling the belly button towards the spine.
5. Raise your head and shoulders off the ground, also pulling up your back gradually.
6. Raise yourself until you are almost in the sitting position.
7. Stay there for 05 seconds and then return to your initial position.
8. However, make sure that you are not relaxing since the exercise is not over yet.
9. Try doing about 10-15 reps of this exercise initially, and then increase them gradually.
10. But, make sure that you do not push yourself too much. If you feel pain around the abs area, then do not continue doing this exercise any longer. You can always do it tomorrow.

As mentioned above, you should refrain from relaxing yourself on the floor between the exercise as this can remove the tension from your body, especially the shoulders and the abs.

This is not something you want to do. For stopping this, you should not allow yourself to lay down fully and keep your shoulders off the floor at all times.

Stretching your neck too much during this exercise implies that you are not doing this exercise properly at all. It means that you are originating this movement from your head and neck instead of your abs. Thus, you might want to keep your neck stiff and not stretch or pull it.

Arching your back during this exercise is a bad option, and you should refrain from doing it. This can cause an injury to your back.

However, it would be best if you didn’t focus on straightening your back instead of focusing on the abs. It is okay if you have some natural arch in the end. This will not curtail the movement. However, a very high inclination is not recommended.

• Bicycle crunches
• Reverse crunches
• Vertical leg crunches
• Crossover crunches
• Long Arm crunches
• Weighted crunches
• Cable crunches