Tag Archives: full sit-ups

The bicycle twist is a core move for the morning

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Clients often tell me about their morning sequence to start their days, and I’m always proud that they take care of themselves. A morning core program can help maintain low back health, improve neuromuscular control, spinal stability, movement pattern efficiency, and injury prevention. But any ab or core exercise you choose needs to be effective, and not potentially lead to lower back pain.

A morning program is ideal for two reasons. First it’s typically the time in which your body is stiff, cold and most prone to injury. Having a routine prior to your busy day is like doing a pre-workout warm-up: It helps to increase soft-tissue blood-flow, warmth and pliability, facilitates neurological awareness and helps develop a psychological readiness for the day ahead. Second, a morning routine gives us another chance to make our habits stick, and if you miss doing it, you have another opportunity to do it later in the day.

The Bicycle Twist is a big external oblique winner.  

If you need a little help in choosing where to start, add Bicycle Twist to your routine, one of the best core exercises. Compared to a crunch, electromyography ( EMG ) shows that this exercise is 9 % more effective at targeting the rectus abdominis and 310 % more effective at targeting the external obliques.

It’s an ab exercise that many people know, also known in Pilates as Criss-Cross, and a go-to in yoga class.

Let’s include a brief anatomical overview of the ab muscles that this exercise targets. Four abdominal muscles hold the contents of the abdomen in place; the rectus abdominis, aka “six-pack”, which stabilize the pelvis and rib cage with respect to each other, transverse abdonimis, a deeper muscle that maintains intra-abdominal pressure, and is not involved in movements of the trunk, and the external and internal obliques that work together to help decelerate the spine as it arches backwards, rotates, and side bends. The external and internal obliques store potential energy, as in a follow-through in a golf swing.

The Most Common Mistake 

The Bicycle Twist targets the abs, yet most people do it wrong, and use the hip flexors. Stop using your hip flexors! They are typically stronger than the abs in trunk flexing movements; hip flexors bring the legs and trunk toward each other. Beyond 30 degrees, in the Bicycle Twist, crunches, or sit-ups, the powerful hip flexors begin to take charge of the movement. In real life, they are more likely to be strong, as you use them to create energy to help swing your leg forward in walking and running.  

Pilates mat exercise studies using EMG found that the hip flexors in Criss- Cross work at an intensity of 41 %. In other words, when you bring your knee towards your torso, the Criss-Cross, or Bicycle Twist becomes an ineffective exercise for the abdominals. The goal of ab training is to maximize the involvement of the abdominals, and minimize the hip flexors. 

Getting it right 

Keep your knees at 90 degrees, instead of flexing the hip to pull your knee in toward your elbow. This will give the back extra support and help target the obliques. 

Connie Aronson is an ACSM Exercise Physiologist and Corrective Exercise Specialist (TBBM-CES )  Visit her at www.conniearonson.com and  Instagram@conniearon

https://www.mtexpress.com/wood_river_journal/features/fitness-guru/article_a62eb6d4-61a6-11eb-bcfb-3f5fb75e1f4c.html

Trade sit-ups for partial curl-ups & planks

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Partial curl-up are a better way to get strong abs than sit-ups. Courtesy photo by Connie Aronson

Partial curl-up are a better way to get strong abs than sit-ups. Courtesy photo by Connie Aronson

My friend Claire is helping whip her new beau into shape, hitting the gym five days a week. Claire also has him doing dozens of sit-ups so he’ll get a movie-star six-pack.  For most people the first thing that comes to mind when you say “abs” is one muscle—the rectus abdominis. She means well, but doing hundreds of sit-ups are hard on your back because of devastating loads to your spine. In 2008, there were 3.4 million emergency room visits—an average of 9,400 per day, for back problems, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Back problems are the fifth most common reason for all doctor visits in the US.  Trading the sit-up for safer and more effective abdominal work can help spare this outcome.

Dr. Stuart McGilll, a professor of spine mechanics and chair of the Department of Kinesiology at The University of Waterloo, points out that spine disks only have so many bends in them before they become damaged. Keep the bends for essential tasks, such a tying shoes, rather than using them in ab training, he recommends. The Army agrees. In 2011, after 30 years, the Army’s Physical Readiness and Combat Tests deemed the sit-up test as an ineffective assessment of a person’s core in relation to their battle strength.In sports that require repeated hyperextension—like gymnastics, diving, volleyball, weight lifting, golf, football, tennis and rowing—the incident of back injury is 11 percent, according to the International Journal of Applied and Basic Sciences. In football lineman, it may be as high as 50 percent. The types of injuries vary with age. In adolescent athletes, nearly 70 percent of lumbar spine injuries occur when forces are exerted on skeletally immature spines, whereas the majority of adult back injuries are related to muscle strain and disc disease.

If you want a stronger, tighter core, instead of full sit-ups, try the traditional crunch or many variations of a curl-up. Lifting your head and shoulders a few inches (around 30 degrees) off the floor and holding briefly is a good exercise to challenge the abdominal muscles while imposing a minimal load to the lumbar spine

Muscle  function
The four layers of abdominal muscles are like a woven basket encompassing the belly. The long vertical rectus abdominis runs vertically from the sternum to the pubis crest and is trained when you do an exercise such as the crunch. The external and internal oblique muscles rotate and side-bend the trunk. The deepest layer, right below your belly-button, named the transversus abdominis, plays a significant role in stabilizing the trunk, specifically the spine, during all movement. All the abdominal muscles hold in our organs and help us in forced exhalation, as in coughing, urinating or giving birth. But the most critically important function throughout the day—writes Judith Lasater, Ph.D., P.T., author of Yoga Abs Moving From Your Core—is stabilization, to keep the back free of pain and the abdomen strong.

Very few sports require fully flexing the spine, as in a full sit-up. Rather, the core transmits power from the hips through the torso as in pitching a ball or running. Here, the abdominals work together with muscles in the lower back, hips and pelvis, known as the core, stabilizing the spine. The core and spine can handle large forces vertically, but not in extreme flexion, as in sit-ups, twisting or bending.

For example, a 154-pound man standing upright has 154 lbs. of pressure on the L3-L4 disc, which the spine can easily handle. Sitting and bending forward 20 degrees, the pressure on L3-L4 bumps up to 264 lbs. In the bent-knee sit-up the pressure almost triples, up to 396 lbs. Simply modifying the sit-up to a partial curl-up, with the head and shoulders lifting a few inches off the floor, eliminates these huge compression forces on the discs.

In a June 2009 New York Times article titled “Core Myths”, the marginalized view of the core being “abs “was challenged by McGill. He compares the spine to a fishing rod supported by muscular guy wires. If all the wires are tensed equally, as in the whole lumbo-pelvic-hip complex, the rod stays straight. A core exercise program should emphasize all the muscles that girdle the spine, not just the abs, to ensure balanced strength. In his lab, he’s demonstrated how an average sit-up can exceed the limit known to increase the risk of back injury in normal American workers.

The full sit-up is three muscle actions: neck flexion, spine flexion and hip flexion. It’s important to be able to sit up, no doubt, but repeated sit-ups do place hundreds of pounds of compression on the lumbar disks. Hooking or holding the feet down stresses the low back even more. Ironically, the bent-knee sit-up has been taught to minimize the action of the hip flexor in the sit-up, though it is not correct. The abs can only curl the trunk. The sit-up is a strong hip flexor exercise (used in climbing stairs or skipping), whether the knees are bent or straight.

McGill says that the following three exercises, done regularly, can provide a well-rounded, core-stability program: practice the curl-ups, learn how to do a side-plank (lie on your side and raise yourself in a straight line) and try the bird-dog (kneel on your hands and knees, legs hip-width apart, raise an alternate arm and leg to hip height and hold for four or six seconds).

Claire tried all three, smitten over both the planks and her slim new guy.

http://theketchumkeystone.org/2014/05/29/health-happiness-trade-sit-ups-for-partial-curl-ups/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=

A Changing Army: Ditching Sit-ups After 30 Years

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Soldiers can forget about sit-ups. For the first time in 30 years, the US army has up-dated its fitness testing to better prepare soldiers for the demands of combat. Lt. General Mark Hertling, the general in charge of the Army’s initial training, collaborated with a 16 member team to revise the Army’s Physical Readiness and Combat tests. Going are the full sit-up test, and the 2 minute push-up and 2 mile run are being revised. Instead, the first test will expand from 3-5 events. The full sit-up goes for several physiological and safety reasons: they don’t do much to strengthen the core to translate to battle strength, and the full flex movement, the actual crunch part of the sit-up, puts an unhealthy strain on the back at its weakest point. The push-up  pace increases to assess upper body endurance, and the run gets shortened to 1.5 miles to assess the anaerobic capacity needed for high intensity bursts in the battlefield. “This is about training smarter, not training more”, Hertling said. Added are a no-rest standing long jump and 1 minute row to look at immediate fatigue and failure.

The out-dated PT test” does not adequately measure components of strength, endurance and mobility. The events have a low co-relation to the performance of warrior tasks and battle drills” said Hertling, who holds a master’s degree in exercise physiology.

Combat veterans trying out the new tests say they are tough. For the Army Combat Readiness test they are in full combat gear while carrying a rifle. They have to excel at sprints, move through hurdles and maneuver balance beams while holding heavy ammo tins, drag a 180 pound sled, and run  sprints.

Specific gender and age standards, from under age 30 to 60, for the test scores will align with the American College of Sports Medicine and Cooper Institute to establish standards and a thorough review before the tests are approved. “Soldiers like to be challenged. This will definitely challenge them”, Hertling said.

Training for the Rest of Us/ Bringing Boot Camp Home

Most of us want to look and feel good and the only battle we face is aging well. But we can take elements of the new testing to inspire us to work a little harder in our work-outs by going beyond where we thought we could, into the “somewhat hard” zone, even if it is only 30 seconds or a minute. High-intensity exercise toughens you up, writes Dr. John Ratey,author of Spark: The Revolutionary New Science Of Exercise and The Brain.”It’s why we climb mountains and sign up for boot camp and Outward Bound trips.” Studies show that by adding a single spurt of sprinting for 30 seconds, on a bike for example, generates a 6 fold increase in human growth hormone, the ” fountain of youth” hormone. Remember, he writes, that by middle age these hormones dwindle to 1/10 of what they were during childhood. The sprints and agility tests that the Army will practice build fast-twitch muscles, which add power to movement. For us mere mortals, these new muscle fibers enhance our metabolism and help us become better at burning fats and carbohydrates for up to 4 hours after training, as well as lowering blood pressure.

Keep the push-ups.Push-ups are a great full body exercise strengthening many muscles at once: abs, front of your legs, arms and back. According to the American College of Sports Medicine fitness test, a 40-49 year old  female or male  performing more than 18 or19  push-ups, respectively, with the chin touching the floor and back straight, scores an “above average” rating. The tests are designed to help you develop a fitness program based on your results. The ACSM and Cooper Institute will also be involved in the Army’s establishment of test standards.

Connie Aronson is an American College of Sports Medicine Health & Fitness Specialist and personal trainer located at the YMCA in Ketchum, Idaho

 

Why Full Sit-ups Can Back-fire

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Core training is the foundation of great athletic performance, whether you’re a seasoned pro or week-end warrior. The core consists of the lumbo-pelvic-hip complex, and the thoracic and cervical spine-not just “abs”. 29 muscles attach to this powerhouse allowing   efficient acceleration, deceleration, and stabilization during dynamic movement. The abdominal wall, part of the core, is like an anatomical corset which also includes the deep transversus abdominis, which are below your belly button, internal obliques, the lumbar multifidus, pelvic floor muscles and the diaphragm. In any athletic move, these muscles work together, like a large stable column, to fire quickly and efficiently. This core, the body’s stabilization system, is like a good foundation on a home: if it’s not built right, the house will have problems somewhere down the road. In the gym, for example, someone lying on a weight bench lifting a bar for a chest press might have their lower back several inches arched in the air, demonstrating an inefficient core. So there is some misunderstanding of what kind of ab exercises work best to keep your mid-section strong .The full sit-up, for example, can place devastating loads on your spine. Simply modifying the sit-up to a partial curl-up, with the head and shoulders lifting a few inches off the floor, would be better.

In a New York Times article last month, titled Core Myths, the belief that the core means only the abs was challenged, for there is no science behind the idea. Stuart McGill, a professor of spine biomechanics and chair of the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Waterloo in Canada, compares the spine to a fishing rod supported by muscular guy wires. If all the wires are tensed equally, as in the whole lumbo-pelvic –hip complex, the rod stays straight. A core exercise program should emphasize all the muscles that girdle the spine, not just the abs, to ensure balanced strength. In his lab, he’s demonstrated how an average sit-up can exceed the limit known to increase the risk of back injury in normal American workers. In fact, in 1991, the safety of the full sit-up test was deemed no longer recommended for school-aged children as a means to test their abs. Instead, the partial curl was recommended.        

The full sit-up is 3 muscle actions: neck flexion, spine flexion, and hip flexion. It’s important to be able to sit up, no doubt, but repeated sit-ups   can place hundreds of pounds of compression on the lumbar disks. Hooking or holding the feet down places even greater stresses to the low back. Ironically, the bent knee sit-up has been taught to minimize the action of the hip flexor in the sit-up, though it is not correct. The abs can only curl the trunk. The sit-up is a strong hip flexor exercise whether the knees are bent or straight.

 Instead of full sit-ups, research shows that although there is no ideal exercise for each individual, the traditional crunch, or many variations of a curl-up, with the head and shoulders lifting a few inches off the floor, holding briefly, is a good exercise to challenge the abdominal muscles while imposing a minimal load to the lumbar spine. Speed of movement has an impact also. In The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research May 2008, curl-up speeds were shown to have a significant impact on spinal loads, and that the combination of slow and moderately controlled speeds  is generally recommended for health and fitness programs. In their opinion, at the competitive level, coaches can choose fast explosive trunk exercises, but to also aim for a more varied program that includes trunk endurance, strength and good motor patterns that ensure spinal stability.

McGill says that 3 exercises, done regularly, can provide a well-rounded core stability program: practice the curl-ups, learn how to do a side-plank (lie on your side and raise yourself in a straight line, and the “bird dog” (from all fours, hands and knees, you raise an alternate arm and leg level  for 4 or 6 seconds) .

 

 Connie Aronson is an ACSM Health & Fitness Specialist in Ketchum, Idaho

Printed in the Idaho Mountain Express August 28, 2009