Best Ab Exercises to include in your ab workout...
Best ab exercises... Here's some interesting research findings.
EMG. Those three letters stand for electromyography.
It's a technique used by researchers to detect the electrical potential of muscle fibres at rest and during contractions.
It's used in clinical settings to help diagnose potential neurological or neuromuscular abnormalities in patients.
Closer to the fitness realm-- biomechanics and other research laboratories use a less invasive technique to measure the general activity of a muscle.
Instead of using needle electrodes which pierce the skin, surface electrodes are applied over the skin and sometimes even over light clothing to monitor and record mean muscle activity.
This is very useful since you could for example, measure the activity of the same muscle for different exercises to determine which exercise of the bunch generates greater muscle activity.
Theoretically, the exercise that generates greater muscular activity is said to be more 'effective' since it requires the muscle to perform at a higher percentage of its maximum capacity.
For instance, you could measure activity of the rectus abdominis (the muscle many people commonly think of as the 'abs'), the external oblique, and also a muscle called the rectus femoris.
The rectus femoris is one of a group of four muscles known as the quadriceps or 'quads' that is primarily responsible for flexing the hip and extending the knee.
And then, you could test their activity against a set of common ab exercises to see if there really is such a thing as the best ab exercises.
In fact, Peter Francis, Ph.D., Jennifer Davis, M.A., and their research team did just that a few years back. There are other studies of course, but this one is quite popular and often quoted.
Testing for the activity of the rectus femoris, a leg muscle, is interesting because it may signify that the exercise is not performed correctly, or that it requires the use of muscles other than the abdominals.
If you raise the legs off the ground to 90 degrees but do not bend the knees so that your feet point directly up toward the ceiling, you will require less rectus femoris activity.
This is one reason why some personal trainers like to have their clients perform the exercise this way. When the legs are bent to 90 degrees, the rectus femoris muscle is further 'shortened' and its ability to contract is compromised-- allowing the client to better focus on the abdominals. This exercise is sometimes called the vertical leg crunch.
The study tested 13 different ab exercises including the ab crunch, reverse crunch, long-arm crunch, vertical leg crunch, bicycle manoeuvre, and a few exercises using typical home and gym exercise equipment-- such as the ab crunch on a stability ball, or the 'Captain's Chair' exercise.
The captain's chair exercise is similar to a better known exercise called a hanging knee raise only you're not 'hanging' by your arms because they're typically braced on arm pads.
The results for each exercise were 'normalized' to that of the ab crunch.
This just means they gave the ab crunch a score of 100 percent, and every other exercise either came in above or below this number.
A score of 248 percent for example, indicates that the exercise generated 148 percent more muscle activity than did the ab crunch. Likewise, a score of 92 percent would mean the exercise generated 8 percent less muscle activity than the crunch.
For an exercise to be labelled as 'notably more effective', it had to score at least 25 percent higher than the ab crunch.
Best Ab Exercises --And the winner is...
Drum roll please...
The best ab exercises for the rectus abdominis were:
Bicycle manoeuvre (score: 248%)
Captain's Chair (score: 212%)
Stability Ball Crunch (score: 139%)
Vertical Leg Crunch (score: 129%)
The long-arm crunch and the reverse crunch (scores: 119 and 109% respectively) were not statistically more effective than the ab crunch for training the rectus abdominis. The reverse crunch did score better for the external oblique...
The best ab exercises for the external oblique were:
Captain's Chair (score: 310%)
Bicycle manoeuvre (score: 290%)
Reverse Crunch (score: 240%)
Best Ab Exercises -- Home Fitness Equipment
Of all the home fitness equipment tested (including some fairly well known 'infomercial' products), it turns out the authors judged the stability ball crunch best ab exercises overall.
A stability ball is a fairly inexpensive piece of home fitness equipment to own-- and one that I have little trouble recommending to my private clients.
But since some home fitness equipment can be quite expensive, and given the score results-- why spend hundreds of dollars when an exercise such as the bicycle manoeuvre out-performs them all and is reputed to give you an excellent ab workout.
This is great news, especially for those of you who like to workout from home and have very little workout space.
Indeed, for both the rectus abdominis and external oblique-- the bicycle manoeuvre rates as one of the top two best ab exercises and will generate 148 percent and 190 percent more muscle activity respectively, than a traditional ab crunch.
Having said this, you should always bear in mind that everyone is a little different and responds to the same exercise stress differently.
Your mastery of exercise form and technique, your abilities, fitness level, and even past injuries may make certain exercises more effective than others for you-- despite what studies say are the best ab exercises.
Further more, you should always place care when reading studies. Depending on their methodology, size and type of sample, source of funding, etc., results may often differ.
This is of course, a fun study to look at but the take home lesson is that you should always do what's best for you based upon your individual set of circumstances.
The best ab exercises are first and foremost, the ones that do you no harm. Secondly, they're the ones you enjoy most so you will actually do them. And thirdly... if they're more 'effective', all the better.
Now that you know what some of the scientific findings have to say about which are the best ab exercises to include in your ab workout, what else might you need to know to achieve that highly coveted six pack abs look?
