JinnTonic

i've been doing cardio (treadmill) for about a year...the doc also said to do back and stomach exercises to take stress off my spine...well, i started really getting into the weights...and i don't know very much about them...i'd watch others and read the little descriptions on the machines...now, i'm beginning to tone up and i like it...

here's the question...i use a machine for abs and it seems to have paid off for those muscles above my naval, but those muscles from the naval down are still soft...will crunches help tone them up??...if not, what should i be doing...thanks...

dman2

http://www.freetrainers.com/ crunches will not help your lower abs. Law down on your back with both legs towards the ceiling. Point your toes downward. Start by using your hands as support, and try to push your heels towards the ceiling. Try not to rock your legs but instead focus on your heels by pushing upward. This is often called a reverse crunch. Focus on doing the movement slow and controlled. Do not hold your breath. It won't do much good if you do. Once you get comfortable with this, try doing a crunch at the same time. This time, bend your knees, but with your knees still facing upward and bring your knees up toward your chest. This should help. There are other exercises that help with the lower abs such as keeping your legs straight and together and bringing them slowly towards the ground while lying on your back. Pull them up quicker and slowly let them down. Don't let them touch the ground. You can then try doing it with your legs spread apart.
I hope this helps and wasn't too confusing. The above address is useful and shows pictures of each exercise.

__________________
I have to exercise in the morning before my brain figures out what I'm doing. ~Marsha Doble

JinnTonic

thanks...you're not a dawg fan are you??

dman2

Fortunately not. I am not originally from Georgia and so I don't really pull for them. My boss is an ex-player and several others here love em. I can't say that I care either way.

__________________
I have to exercise in the morning before my brain figures out what I'm doing. ~Marsha Doble

Willravel

Agreed, dman. Crunches, while good for the upper abdominals, is basically useless in toning the lower abdominals.
Try this: start by lying down on your back with your knees bent and your feet flat on the ground. o__A
Lift your legs up bending at the waist. o_<
I would reccomend doing 3 sets of 12 at first. After you are used to it, try doing it weighted.

McDuffie

You cannot train lower abs alone.

According to Dr. Fred Hatfield, PhD:

If you look at the abdominal muscle's insertion and origin, it's easy to see why this is so.

Do crunches, you work the upper and lower abs; do leg raises, you work the upper and lower abs.

It's called non-contiguous innervation.

McDuffie

I know this is an old post, but I cannot have erroneous information out there with my name on it. Let me tell you how I got to the point that I would say this:

1) I started working out in the early 1980s. The mytholology then and now was that muscles could be shaped by doing different exercises. In other words, certain exercises will give you thick lats, and certain others will give you wide lats. I believed these myths because I had no real reason not to.

2) As I became more educated about kinesiology and biomechanics, I learned that this not so. Muscles cannot be shaped. This mythology can be directly traced to the writings of one man: Bill Reynolds, former editor of Muscle and Fitness Magazine.

3) The hypothesis of muscle shaping says that lifting in certain ways, or doing certain exercises will work parts of a muscle. Pec flyes work the 'inner part' of the chest, closest to the sternum; bench presses work the 'outer' part of the chest. This is not possible. When you observe the nervous system, you see that the nerves stimulate muscle cells throughout the muscle. As I mentioned above, it's noncontinguous innervation. Do a google search of that phrase for a better explanation than I can provide here.

4) About a month after I made the above post, I was reading my textbook in final preparation for my test and I found that I was wrong. Here is a quote from the textbook:

The man I quote in my previous post, Dr. Fred Hatfield, contributed to the textbook and edited the final version. It's not that Hatfield was wrong about upper and lower abs, it's that I didn't read the rest of the article.

So I was wrong. There is only one other muscle that can be somewhat shaped: the pectoralis majoris (i.e. chest). The reason why is that the pec is actually two muscles in one, with a common insertion point. There is the clavicular pectoral (upper) and the sternal (lower) pectoral. The reason that the pec can be somewhat shaped is that the upper and lower pecs are innervated by two different nerves. Both of these nerves fire when you do pec movements, but incline bench presses will stimulate the upper pec more than the lower pec and flat or inverted bench presses will do the opposite.

Will you ever notice a difference? Probably not. If you utterly abandoned flat benching and only did incline benching, perhaps years later, you might notice that your pecs are more developed on the top than in the main belly of the muscle. It's a 60/40 thing, or maybe even 55/45. 55 to 60% of the power in flat benching comes from the lower pecs and 55 to 60% of the power in incline bench pressing comes from the upper pecs.

Can you work your inner pecs? No

Can you do concentration curls to increase your biecps 'peak'? Absolutely not.

Ok, thank you for bearing with me. I wanted to correct that information.

McD