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Best Ab Exercises, According to Science |
But, like in any other industry, fitness trends are meant to come and go – remember when sit-ups were the flavor of the month? The problem with these opinion shifts is that they’re rarely based on solid scientific evidence, which is why many great classic exercises have been thrown out of the window only because a few self-proclaimed fitness gurus have said so.
Let’s be honest: crunches are far from the most exciting of exercises. But the way they have been vilified in recent years is far from an objective assessment backed up by scientific data – it has more to do with our collective discovery that spot reduction is a myth and crunches can’t be used to specifically burn abdominal fat. And although the current trend in fitness fashion seems to dictate that planks better exercise your abs than crunches, the reality is that some variations of crunches can train your abs very effectively and they deserve their place in your ab routine.
If you’re looking for the best exercise to tone and strengthen your abs, read this article to find out what studies on muscle activation have to say about it!
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THE WINNER IS… STANDARD CRUNCH
Yup, really. As it turns out, when crunches are performed correctly, they do an amazing job at activating nearly all abdominal muscles. Physiologists and exercise scientists claim that if you go through a full range of motion and focus on engaging the abdomen to lift the shoulders up off the ground while doing crunches, you can reap far greater gains from this exercise than from most other popular ab moves, especially the ones performed on trendy machines.
The American Council on Exercise (ACE) recently conducted a study which measured muscle activity during different ab exercises, using electrodes to measure muscle contraction during 16 exercises, including the traditional crunch. The results showed that the crunch produced the greatest muscle activation of all the exercises. If you’re thinking: “That might be true, but there are still many other studies which claim that crunches suck”, let us explain – the most important part of the ACE study is that subjects were made to perform crunches very deliberately and with flawless form, which is not how people typically approach this exercise.
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