Muscle fitness goes beyond power and strength. Muscular endurance plays a key role in your ability to use your muscles during sports competitions or long workouts. Crunches are an excellent way to improve your abs, but you have many more options for developing your core. To maximize the effectiveness of stomach workouts, use a variety of ab exercises and equipment to target all areas of your midsection.
Muscular Endurance
To use your muscles during long games or matches or to perform at your peak during a strenuous workout, you will need muscular endurance. Endurance is your ability to make muscle contractions over time. Exercising with less weight than you use for bodybuilding and more repetitions of each exercise per set build endurance.
Abdominals
The six-pack area of your core is your rectus abdominis and the one most people focus on during workouts. The obliques are located near the sides of your stomach area, important for helping you rotate your core during most athletic activities, such as swinging a bat, club or racket or performing any turning movement.
Endurance Workouts
To build muscular endurance, perform circuit-training workouts that keep your muscles working with only short breaks between sets of exercises. Use about half your maximum intensity to perform exercises for one minute, then take a break of one or two minutes. Start a new exercise, repeating this pattern for 30 minutes or longer. If you want to work your upper or lower body only, repeat three or four exercises, performing two or three sets of each one during your workout. If you want to perform a full-body workout, perform one set of each exercise, alternating upper-body, lower-body and core exercises each set.
Ab Exercises
Move your core muscles forward and backward and side to side to work your entire core. Perform crunches and reverse crunches, moving your head toward your knees for the former and your knees back toward your chest for the latter. Use an ab wheel, starting on your knees if you are a beginner. Roll the wheel straight forward and back, using only your core muscles. Roll forward and off to the left, then forward and to the right to work your obliques. Hold a medicine ball or other weight at arms’ length and slowly turn side to side to work your obliques. Lie flat on your back with your legs raised, creating an L shape. Using your core muscles only, lift your hips and buttocks off the floor, hold for two seconds, then lower.
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