...I just couldn't resist. Stop doing crunches right now. Do not ever, ever, ever do another crunch, please, at least not the way you're doing them. I'm going to have to give you a little background education on this one to explain it, so this will take a minute, but in the end you will achieve virtual enlightenment, which could lead to complete and total consciousness! :)
First off- abs are just like any other muscle in the way they perform. Obviously, all muscles have their particular function in what they do to stabilize and/or move your skeleton around. However, they have no significant difference from other muscles in their structure and composition(they do have a different shape and pennation). Some muscles do have more fast twitch than slow twitch fiber than other muscles, but we won't get into that.
My reason for pointing out that abs are the same as other muscles is because I'm going to illustrate what happens to muscles when you train them in certain rep ranges. Examples of rep ranges are 3-5 reps for heavy weight, 12-15 for light weight, and 6-9 for a comprimise. You get the point. These rep ranges are an expression of the percentage of the one rep max. The more weight it is, the less reps you can do.
They have done extensive studies that show what happens to your muscles and your performance based on training in certain rep ranges, so I hope you'll believe what I'm about to tell you because its going to be completely opposite of what you think to be true. Feel free to look it up in strength training journals, or Google strength training, or even "bodybuilding rep range"---something like that. Just don't listen to your average personal trainer, or your average "Exercise Science" major from an American university, unless that person is a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist or something with a background in strength training, or even bodybuilding. I was a CSCS and Division I college strength coach, by the way, and I was mentored by a hall of fame strength and speed coach. Just sayin.
Aaaaanyway, 2-5 rep range is for strength and power; 10-13 is for bodybuilder type muscle growth, and 6-9 is a compromise of the two. Anything above 14 reps only builds local muscular endurance and doesn't do a whole lot to change the structure of the muscle. There is no black and white. It would be good to know why 10-13 is optimal for muscle growth, but I don't have time to explain it. All you should know is that nothing in your body happens without hormones, and these rep ranges typically produce the hormones that cause the results that I just described. Some hormones cause fat loss and muscle growth, and even pace of the workout and density of the workout (volume/time) can change the result. So- again, there's no black and white.
Here's my point with abs: Look up above at the sentence in bold, and then ask yourself why you're doing twenty-fifty crunches unless you're going for crunch endurance because you have a huge crunch contest coming up. High rep ranges do not make muscles hard or toned, and they certainly do not take fat away from that area("spot-reduction" is impossible), which leads me to the part you won't believe- Lifting heavy weight makes you hard and toned. Right- I know what you're thinking. I'm sorry, but the notion of high-reps creating muscle tone is just flat wrong. Feel free to cross-reference me with Russian sports science journals or what have you. Its because anytime you've seen weightlifting on t.v. in America you've seen these huge fat guys lifting the bars overhead, and they never show you the 145 lb guy who's hard as a rock snatching 345 lbs over his head. Additionally, most of the American research into sports science has been put into cardiovascular studies, not strength and muscularity like the Eastern bloc countries. Plus, its normal to associate size with strength. Yes, bigger muscles can usually handle more weight, but if you take that bigger guy and do strength training rep ranges, he will get even stronger and his muscles will get harder, not necessarily bigger. When you train for strength- (heavy weight, low reps, lots of rest between sets, frequent training sessions) you are training your central nervous system more than anything, and because of that type of training, its like your central nervous system is keeping your muscles ready for the next heavy session by keeping the muscle fiber halfway tensed even when you are relaxed. That is real muscle tone. There is no other type of muscle tone. Now, lifting heavy can make your muscles bigger if your "training age" is young, meaning if you've never worked out much or haven't worked out much recently, but thats an ancillary point.
Heavy lifting makes your muscles hard. If you train with the 6-9 rep range, you're getting a comprimise- some tone and some growth. If you do the bodybuilder thing (10-13 rep range) you get muscle fiber growth, blood vessel growth, mitochondria growth, sarcoplasmic growth, etc. So, that rep range makes your muscle fibers and all the stuff around your muscle fibers bigger but doesn't make you stronger. Because bigger muscles can tighten the skin a little, it may cause a "toned effect" but its not real muscle tone and its not eliminating fat in that area.
Besides all the random people and personal trainers(two-day course for the certificate) fooling you by telling you that high reps and light weight is the way to go for tone, three other huge factors are helping to fool you. Temporary rigor mortis, lactic acid, and blood flow.
Temporary rigor mortis is just your muscles running out of creatine, which your muscles use for short bursts of energy. When you go into high reps, your muscles run out of it and the contractile proteins find themselves unable to detach and reload. So, your muscles get harder temporarilly making you feel like you just got yourself all ripped up from your crunches.
Lactic acid is just a by-product of anaerobic exercise and is just something in your blood that makes your muscles burn at certain stages. It does nothing for you whatsoever. Do not think that "feeling the burn" in an acute area will help you at all. Now, workouts that generate a lot of "total body" lactic acid production can be great for muscle building and fat loss, but thats another blog entry.
The blood that can pool in your muscles will make them a little bigger temporarilly.
So- if you do a hard fifteen minute high-rep ab workout, your abs will stand out a little more and feel tight because of the blood and feel hard because of the lack of creatine, so you can actually pull your shirt up and possibly see more ab definition than before. Its all temporary. Now if you want your abs to grow, you could workout in the 10-13 range, but I don't want mine to grow. I would rather them be hard and defined. (I do very few ab exercises, by the way. They get enough work from stabilizing me during sports and athletic weightlifting.) I have a suspicion that you do abs in the above 20 range, which means you're achieving nothing but the temporary effects, local muscular endurance, and very light calorie burning(I can burn more calories getting out of my car.) I don't think you can explain a very good reason for the local muscular endurance. You'd get more good ab endurance from the stabilization they do when you're doing your normal endurance stuff. Your abs get plenty of work during other physical activities.
So, if there's not a functional reason to do abs(rectus abdominus: main function is to bring pubic bone closer to sternum), then why do you do them. Is it to trim up that gut? You can't spot-reduce i.e. fat does not strip off the top of a muscle just because that muscle has been flexing all day long. Your body stores fat where it stores fat. If you want less fat on your body, it needs to be a holistic approach or liposuction. Bringing your sternum closer to your pubic bone over and over won't help. Neither will situps(main muscles used are the hip flexors, ilio psoas and rectus femoris) Neither will side bends. None of that stuff will strip fat off in my opinion because none of those will burn more calories than total body movements or higher calorie burning activities.
Why do you want your abs to be slightly more attractive if nobody can see them anyway. The fat isn't going anywhere unless you take another approach.
Now, that was too long of a post, but aren't you glad you don't have to do any more ab workouts whatsoever? Just replace those with even better calorie burning routines and/or better nutrition, and make sure you're doing as many total body movements and using machines as little as possible, so your core has to stabilize you like in athletics.
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