How to do the crunch on the floor?

The floor crunch is probably the best known and easiest exercise for to build up the abdominal muscles without equipment.

Which muscles are used during the crunch?

This exercise targets mainly the rectus abdominis and to a lesser extent the obliques, it would rather solicit the top of the abdominal muscles as opposed to the exercises of knee or leg lifts which would target the bottom of the abdominal muscles even if in reality it is only one muscle: the rectus abdominis

How do you do the exercise?

The crunch can be done lying on the floor on a gym mat or on a bench. Place your hands at the level of the ears or the arms crossed on the chest but not on the nape of the neck to avoid pulling on it like many practitioners do. Then put your feet on the floor, legs bent but you can also bring the knees towards the chest to avoid arching the lower back too much.

You must then try to roll up your bust by strongly contracting your abdominal muscles without taking off the lower back then return to the initial position by keeping a slow and controlled continuous tension.

Exhale during the contraction and never block your breath.

CAUTION:

Do not put your hands behind your neck to avoid hurting your neck by pulling on it. Touch your ears lightly with your hands during the whole exercise, nothing more!

Do not take off the lower back, the amplitude of the crunches on the ground must be rather reduced so that that remains effective.

It is not useful to lock your feet when performing your abdominal exercises because by doing so you will put more strain on the hip flexor muscles and therefore reduce the effectiveness of the exercise.

Tips

1. We often see exercisers do hundreds and hundreds of crunches without feeling anything. Even if the abdominal muscles are quite enduring and you can do more repetitions than for other muscle groups, you should try to make sure that you voluntarily contract them at each repetition so that you only need 15 to 20 repetitions to really feel an intense contraction or burn. Don't hesitate to add a disc or weight to make the exercises harder.
2. 3 abdominal sessions per week is more than enough. In addition to the crunch, include chest rotation exercises for the obliques, but also gainage exercises for the transverse muscles in particular.
3. Doing exercises to strengthen your abs will not make your abs or the famous 6-pack appear visibly. For that you will have to put in place in addition to a weight-training program and cardio a real tailored nutrition planWithout a proper diet it will be impossible to see them!

Variants

1. You can place your feet on a bench and keep your lower back on the floor.
2. The cross crunch to work the obliques is also a very complete exercise
3. You can bend your knees towards your chest to avoid arching your back.
4. The legs can be stretched upwards to increase the difficulty of the exercise.
5. The reverse crunch which is undoubtedly more difficult to perform. You can do it with the bodybuilding machine called the sit-up
6. Instead of doing a full crunch, you can do a half crunch.
7. You can do crunches on the pulley or crunches on a Swiss ball.
8. There is also a crunch machine specifically designed to strengthen the abdominal muscles. It is available in some gyms.

To conclude, working the abs is good but to see them, you will need a diet established according to this objective.

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