Carl & Sandra's

How many times have you read about people, or know someone, or you are one of them, who tried to reduce waist size by doing hundreds or thousands of stomach repetitions to no avail? In fact, your waist size may have gone up. What is happening is that you were gaining muscle and not burning fat. Muscle is roughly two-thirds the size of fat. As long as one is losing fat or burning fat, the waist size goes down. If not, then the added muscle, with no reduction in fat, results in larger waists. You are not getting wasted (waisted)! Because of the way stomach exercises are usually performed, they do not burn many calories and do not help reduce fat in the waist. You have to depend on other exercises to burn the fat. We have a martial arts member at our gym who likes his burgers and chips. He works out hard but will not give up the fried stuff. He rationalizes it like this: "I have these two or three inches of fat that the kick has to go through. That slows 'em down. Then I have these two to three inches of muscle from doing so many stomach exercises, this is very hard, and that kills 'em. I call it the Double Whammy Block!" This is a new technique in martial arts.

Stomach muscles are extremely important in clearing up or managing back pain. For that reason, we do exercises that are not offensive to the back. They are short ranges of motion, and we make sure the spine is curled when doing even a limited range of motion. Once we know a person has strong stomach muscles and a pain-free back, we lengthen the range of motion and add a time frame because stomach exercises can burn more calories if done rapidly for a specific length of time. The fad, even among people who should know better, is to do limited ranges of motion when doing stomach exercises. This greatly limits the strength range of the stomach muscles and could set them up for an injury. Many sports require the stomach to be strong over a wide range of motion. If the range of motion is small, it does not blend in well to the neuromuscular coordination pattern of how stomach muscles are used in daily life or in many sports. Short ranges of motion can be boring! If they are done for long period of time, the value is almost zilch when trying to gain strength. Strength is not developed that way and with the movements so short what cardiovascular ability is being developed? Zilch! I take that back because it is not entirely true. How could I be so negligent not to remember the dead barber from San Quentin we worked on in anatomy class at the University of California? His forearms were tremendously vascularized--from cutting hair all day long, day in and day out. He did no other exercise so not only were other parts of his body not vascularized, neither was his heart. I rest my case.

Do stomach exercises through long ranges of motion when you can and you involve other parts of your body, usually your legs. Your heart really pumps and the resultant cardiovascular workout burns many calories. There is justification for slow motions with lots of weight if you can achieve good mechanical position, because the result in time is a big gain in strength. However, be careful because there is a risk of losing control of your form and injuring your back. What about doing sit-ups, or even short crunchies, with your hands held behind your head? Maybe, if you are strong and never had any back injuries. However, why take the chance of having your hands behind your head, even if you have a flexible back and can curl up. Other exercises are better and weights or intensity can be distributed so there is not that concentrated force on a small area of your lower back. Let the wrestlers and gymnasts put up with these risks. You do not have to!