Given the abdominal exercises, I immediately think of my head on the floor (carpeted for some reason) in the elementary school gymnasium. Twice a week, our teacher marched us for ritual humiliation and light gymnastics, and under the careful gaze of a former football coach with a whistle constantly hanging from his lips. , We warmed up with the movements we were told — jump jacks, push-ups, toe touches, and of course the abdominal muscles.
With rare exceptions, I was not good at abdominal exercises. Lean on your partner’s toes and do your best while throwing a 10-count torso forward. However, children are floppy creatures, and abdominal exercises are especially floppy exercises. In the PE class, I bent over, strained my neck, and skipped my arms from the Dracula pose with my chest crossed. Starting from elementary school once a year, the Presidential Fitness Test required as much abdominal exercises as possible per minute as long as the small body could stand. Eventually, we were introduced to the crunch. This was a truncated variation of abdominal exercises that did not make the adolescent flaring of the time a bit dramatic.
The ideas behind these lessons have been the same for generations. Doing abdominal exercises and crunching a lot is not only a reliable way to build strength, but also a reliable way to measure it. Abdominal exercise, both as a unit of exercise and as a way of life, is the only type of fitness professional available to most people at the time: Jim’s teacher, my exercise nuts dad, and the hard of the 1990s fitness informants. Approved by the body. A suspiciously effective gadget such as AbRoller. Questioning its usefulness would have felt a bit stranger than questioning whether humans would benefit from a little jogging. But by the time I finished my PE class, abs exercise had already begun to quietly disappear from American fitness by the mid-2000s. In the years that follow, this iconic exercise will further develop its status. Old-fashioned activists may be surprised to hear that the fall from this grace is now complete. The abdominal exercises are over.
Institutional promotion to motivate Americans began in the 19th century. Federal officials were afraid that new types of work and large-scale urban migration would transform the country of hearty agricultural workers into one of the people of a settled city. This situation was considered nothing more than a national security risk. A physically weak country supplied its army with weak soldiers. These anxieties have long influenced American thinking about fitness and have solidified the link between the practice of military exercises and the tendency of civilian movements. So the abdominal exercises that have existed in some way since ancient times were that the US Army did not completely conquer the United States until the early 1940s, when it was enshrined in physical training and testing of cadets. That decision almost guaranteed that the children would hang out on the school floor for most of the next century. Later, the US Navy and Marines approved the crunch. Whichever variation was used, military personnel had to complete as much as possible in two minutes. This is twice the time later allocated to elementary school students, but otherwise the same test.
Our understanding of how the body moves and gains strength Evolved, To say the least, in the last 80 years or so. When old researchers tried to understand the body, they considered the elements separately. “Anatomists will remove connective tissue around the muscles,” Pete McCall, a personal trainer and fitness educator who trained instructors at the National Academy of Sports Medicine and the American Athletic Council, told me. Then they observed and manipulated the muscles lying flat. That’s how McCall said, they decided that your abdominal muscles would pull your spine, and that your abdominal muscles would need to pull a lot on your spine to keep getting stronger.
Now it turns out that the muscles do not work alone. The abdominal oblique muscle, which is the most prominent muscle in the torn central part, works in concert with many other muscles, such as the diaphragm, oblique muscles, erector spinae muscles, and pelvic floor muscles, to perform most small movements. increase. People only notice after a really funny sleep. When people talk about “core”, which has largely replaced the fitness term “abdominal muscle”, they work together, so they mean all of these muscles. However, it took decades of research to realize the error. In the meantime, the decentralized approach to human anatomy has been very influential among other groups that helped set up traditional knowledge of movement. “The first people to popularize all of this exercise were bodybuilders trying to sculpt and define one muscle at a time,” McCall told me. Spot trainingThe idea that targeted exercise can effectively remove fat and build muscle mass in one area of the body is stubbornly resistant to change among novice exercisers, especially when it comes to the abdominal muscles. It is a myth to do.Spam False Promise One weird trick to reduce belly fat To this day they live in the wreckage of internet advertising just because people click on it.
Their understanding of human strength began to change as researchers studied more subjects that were upright and, importantly, alive. “If you really want to understand the anatomy and how the muscles work, you need to understand what the muscles do when the human body is moving in gravity with both feet,” McCall says. I did. Asked if he could pinpoint the beginning of the end of abs, he led me to the work of Canadian biomechanics researcher Stuart McGill, who was probably the most responsible person for the end of abs. Said.
Magill, Professor Emeritus of the University of Waterloo, Ontario and author of the book Back mechanic, I didn’t start his education with a special interest in abdominal exercises. His work focused on the spine. But from the 1990s to the 2000s, he led research that changed the way fitness professionals think about exercise. His findings show that abdominal exercises and crunches are more than just mediocre muscle-building movements. They were actually hurting many people. “If you bend your spine many times forward when it’s not under load, it doesn’t really affect your spine,” Magill told me. He gave an example of a belly dancer he studied. They bend the spine repeatedly without a high incidence of injury. “This problem occurs when you bend over and over again due to higher muscle activation or a load from an external object in your hand.”
If you have ever been told Lift with your feet, This is the reason. When a person’s spine bends and becomes tense to move weight through space, such as when a herd of third graders flutters a set of abdominal exercises, the movement stresses the intervertebral discs of the spine. The more often you ask to bend your spine in these situations, the higher the risk. This is the second half of life, even if people working by moving inventory around warehouses or stacking produce bushels on trucks can’t point out acute back injuries along the way. It’s a way to end up with back pain. McGill has found that the most reliable way to avoid this kind of chronic problem is to reinforce the core when you pick up a heavy object. This means tensioning the major muscles to protect the structural integrity of the spine and help transfer power to the hips and legs. It’s no coincidence that weight lifters follow this advice when performing deadlifts safely. Perfect shape is not always possible for workers dealing with irregular loads and crowded spaces, but intentional movement is all about shape. It is important to get it right and rejuvenate the intended muscles.
Abdominal exercises and crunches violate all these principles. Exercise asks you to pick up heavy things, but since you’re lying on the ground and heavy things are your upper body, there’s no way to support your core and shift your efforts to the large, massive muscles of your feet. .. And exercise, by its very nature, is repetitive. For generations, both school children and the army were told to do as much abs or crunches as possible in order to get good scores on compulsory tests. Magill stipulated that some people can perform these exercises without problems, but their abilities are largely dependent on genetic factors such as how light or heavy a person is, rather than a specific execution skill. To do. For population-level instruction and testing, abs exercise simply doesn’t work.
When Magill and other experts published their findings, he was questioning the superiority of abdominal exercises, especially from those who found injury patterns consistent with his study, in the U.S. and Canadian forces. I started listening to my trainer and physiotherapist. Fitness instruction. Over the last decade, all U.S. military branches have begun to phase out abs and crunches from the required testing and training regimens. If not, we made them optional, along with more orthopedic sound operations such as boards. Army and Marine Corps spokespersons said these decisions at their branch were made partially to avoid the high rates of back pain seen during military training for speed abs and crunch tests. I confirmed that.
According to fitness educator McCall, many trainers will pay attention if the military decides that long-term standard exercise is no longer a snuff. Due to the size and fame of the military training program, their institutional practices continue to have a significant impact on the movement of civilians, which has helped push abdominal exercises to the limit over the past few years. .. I also forgave my child’s physical fitness test. The Presidential Youth Fitness Program, which replaced the Presidential Fitness Test almost 10 years ago, now encourages children to practice curl-up. a bit. (If your fitness routine regularly includes boards, bird dogs, or dead insects, it’s also Magill. He didn’t develop those exercises, but an alternative to abs exercises. Induced to use them in the mainstream.)
McCall said he wouldn’t be shocked at all if he hadn’t noticed that the crunches around him had disappeared, or if he had a trainer doing sit-ups. Like many other American industries, the fitness business is integrated, but still includes many independent instructors and small businesses. Educators in the industry have been refraining from doing sit-ups and crunches for years, but there are no licenses or continuing education requirements to teach them. It can take some time if the trainer does not look for new information or techniques. Information and new ideas to reach them. Even the latest instructors may have many clients who will just keep exercising because they always understand it. “A good trainer educates clients,” McCall told me. “But the sad fact is that some clients will feel like they aren’t well trained if they don’t do a couple of sets of crunches.”
..
