Sitting Crunch – What Is It? How To Do It?

So yesterday, I wrote a blog post about an Ab Workout Plan — and of the exercises I mentioned a lot is the “sitting crunch”. I have a feeling that people aren’t going to know what I’m talking about.

Plus, I took a quick look on Google and couldn’t find a good description of the actual exercise I was talking about, in fact, I couldn’t find ANY description. Only someone sitting at a chair and doing a crunch in that position.

Why The Sitting Crunch Works So Well

Your abs were not designed to do a lot of flexion and “crunching” movements. In fact, their main purpose is to just stabilize your spine and keep your torso upright and provide the power to move around your body parts.

That’s why when you hear people talking about “functional core training” you often hear them talk about exercises that stress the stabilizing aspects of this part of your body — your core.

And it’s true — training your abs in this manner is more functional and has more carry over to daily life and athletics (think about it: how many times have you had to “crunch” your torso down in every day life? Maybe getting off the floor or something but your abs are used to stabilize your body 100x more each day than they ever do “crunching”).

Here’s how to do the sitting crunch, it’s a challenging ab exercise I assure you.

How To Do It – Start Position

• Sit on your butt
• bend your knees, the closer your feet to your butt the harder it is.
• Hands on your knees.
• Look at the crappy stick figure picture below (side view)
• 

Start The Exercise

• Keeping your butt on the ground and your hands on your knees
• Slowly, keeping your torso as upright as possible (keep your lower back flat) begin to lean back…
• You want to keep leaning back until your arms are completely straight and your butt is still on the floor, your feet haven’t moved and your hands are still lightly touching your knees
• IMPORTANT: Don’t use your hands to hang on to your knees or help you keep from falling back, your fingers should be barely touching your knees not helping you!
• 

The Hard Part

• Once your arms are all the way extended and your torso is leaning back
• Let go of your knees with your hands and slowly raise them above your head
• You should feel your core working over time to keep your torso upright, shaking and all that…
• 

Finish It

• Slowly lower your hands all the way down to your knees and
• reverse the movement till you’re sitting in the starting position again
• Thats’ one rep!

So that’s one rep of the sitting crunch exercise and that’s how you do it! It’s a great exercise to do because it makes your abs work over time to stabilize your body and hold it upright — it’s really hard if you’re doing it right — and you can increase the difficulty by holding your hands overhead for longer on each rep. Try it and you’ll see.