Work your ab muscles with a stability ball. Learn how to do crunches on a ball in this free video clip from a personal trainer.
Sue Conrad is a personal trainer with a certification through the American Council on Exercise (ACE). She currently teaches cardio kickboxing. She trains clients of various ages and fitness levels.
Okay, in this clip we are going to be doing crunches on the stability ball. Now you have several options as far as the stability ball goes so there are many different name brands out there. Okay, you want to roll forward. Okay, keep your back fully supported, knees bent at a ninety degrees, hands behind the head. Now, the most important thing with this one is to watch your back so do not bring your body up any higher than what is comfortable. Just bring it up high enough to where the abs contract. Hands behind the head exhale up. You will see I am not coming up very far, but I can surely feel those abs start to burn. Okay, exhale up and inhale down. Exhale up, tighten up those abs, and then relax down. One of the mistakes that a lot of people do when they do this exercise is they do it way too quickly and they use their back muscles more than their abdominal muscles. Of course there are many different ways to do this exercise. If you have balance issues you can put your knees and your toes against the wall or just the toes to provide a little bit of extra balance. Squeeze up. Now, when you come back down in the relaxation phase you want to keep your back nice and straight. A lot of people roll back like this which is wrong, you are going to hurt your back and you are actually using more momentum than muscle when you are doing this abdominal exercise. So I am going to come back nice and flat, crunch forward, exhale, and then relax.
Member Comments