The effectiveness of abdominal exercises such as the traditional crunch, modified crunch and exercises using gym and home exercise equipment were tested in a recent study. In first place was the bicycle maneuver in which you lie on your back and imitate riding a bicycle.
This study is questionable since it only examined a few exercises that are very limited or similar in nature. For example they did not test the reverse trunk twist, Russian twist, seated sit ups, or reverse sit ups which many can consider to be most effective. In addition, the study did not differentiate between development of the different sections of the abdominal muscles.
Because of this. should the bicycle exercise be considered the best? If you look closely at execution of this exercise, you will see that it does not strengthen the abdominals through the full range of motion. Nor does this exercise fully target the oblique muscles which are equally important to the rectus abdominus which is the main crunch and bicycle exercise muscle.
Thus, doing crunch and bicycle exercises gives you limited abdominal muscle development. They may be good for beginners just getting started, but they are not very effective for more advanced fitness buffs and especially athletes. In fact, for most athletes these exercises may prove to be a negative.
To completely develop all of the abdominal muscles, you must do exercises such as the 45-degree sit-up to target the upper abdominals, reverse sit-up to target the lower abdominals and reverse trunk twist to target the obliques. No one exercise can target all three muscles equally. However, these exercises are rarely executed by most people in a gym or even in on athletic teams. But yet, these are still basically beginning exercises.
More advanced exercises to strengthen all the abdominal muscles include sit-ups on the Yessis Back Machine (the original Glute Ham Developer) with adjustments made to target either the upper abdominals or the lower abdominals and the Russian twist to target the obliques. Isn’t it about time that we stop doing only the crunch and its variants and look to other exercises for more effective development of the abdominal muscles?