Your abs get just too much attention, sorry guys and girls but the media, tv infomercials, your favorite exercise magazine, they all spend time focusing on that bit of flesh between your rib cage and your crotch.

sit ups, crunches, more sit ups, lots of those crunches. Hell the crunch machine in the gym i am based is the only one that needs maintenance each month!

Then there are those guys and girls who look simply awesome, yet you never see then sweating out 100+ crunches each day? How does that work?

1. You can’t spot reduce… if I had a dollar for the number of times I have said that… This means you can’t lose fat from a specific area by doing an exercise in that area.

2. Doing crunches just doesn’t get your metabolism fired up enough. You ain’t working enough muscle mass during a crunch to provoke your fat burning system in to doing enough work.

3. Doing the same movement over and over again, day after day, week after week, month after…. you get the idea… well your body gets used to doing that movement pattern, and it finds the most efficient way to do the movement, meaning if you where getting some kind of benefit from doing it, that benefit has now long gone.

4. Pelvic alignment… most of the time when we do crunches badly we end up working other muscles, namely the hip flexor muscles, which to be honest are shortened on most folk anyway from sitting on your arse all day. Anyway doing crunches makes the hip flexors even shorter, rotating our pelvis forwards, making you look like you have a pot belly.

5. When did our body ever need to lift our shoulders from a laying position and back down again 100+ times.

6. Did you see the film 300? Those guys got six packs from everything but crunches… I’ll find the video for you :o)

7. Most people are short of time, why focus all your training time of just working a tiny strip of muscle for more than half of your gym time.

8. The phrase “Abs are made in the Kitchen” is over used, but sadly it is so true. No matter how many ab crunches you do, if you are still eating that junk you’ll always have a layer of fat sat over the top of them.

9. Crunches hurt your neck, give you back ache and cause you to swear and curse… And at the end of all that has it really made a difference?

10. Six Second Abs, Ab King Pro, Winsor Pilates…. read the small print at the bottom of the page… there is a reason why they give you a diet plan to go with your favorite infomercial ab machine.

11. Girls like crunches because they make you look like you are doing the right thing in the gym!

12. Guys like crunches because they are a great way to look like you are doing some floor work before forgetting to do your stretches…. AGAIN!

13. Belly fat is dumb! It does not know where it is! Really! your body will burn fat (given the right opportunity) from the whole of your body. Do exercises that work the whole body, give your body the RIGHT opportunity to acheive this by working out smarter, not longer or harder or with exercises that really are quite pointless…