Why crunches won't flatten your stomach

I wrote this a while back but thought it might be useful to re-post. It seems that crunches still haven't died the death they deserve. Maybe this will be the nail in the coffin of crunches for someone out there who STILL believes that crunches will flatten her belly...........

It would seem that the core training phenomenon has twisted the minds of many rational thinking and intelligent human beings. We all know that core strength is really important. We all talk about it at some point or another as something we feel we might need to improve. But what most people don't understand about core strength is that it's not something you do to flatten your gut and get rid of belly fat. The record needs to be set straight so we're all using trendy terms without making jackasses out of ourselves.

Core strength is really about how strong ALL of our muscles are in our ENTIRE torso, not just the muscles running down the front of our stomachs. Core training is far more than doing crunches. The muscles in our core include all of our abdominal muscles (rectus abdominus, transversus, internal and external obliques) but also our hip flexors, pelvic floor muscles, glutes, all of our back muscles, and muscles around the shoulder girdle.

So given the fact that core strength is about all of these muscles, why are we all still so obsessed with the standard crunch (AKA sit up) as a way to melt fat from our stomachs? How does it make any sense that lying down on our backs and crunching up repeatedly in one direction would convert fat tissue into muscle tissue and magically melt away all the extra calories we ate that set up camp on our bellies? Do you think maybe that we get belly fat not because our abdominals are weak but perhaps because we eat too much? Come on people.

Top ten reasons why doing crunches won’t flatten your gut:

1) The whole spot reduction idea is so old school in a bad way. Let it go people for once and for all!

2) Abs are made in the kitchen (at least 80% of how your abs look have to do with what you eat).

3) Doing an hour of core training every day would have less of an impact on your ab fat than chronic sleep deprivation. Being chronically under slept will make you store fat in your gut (aka visceral fat).

4) If you constantly stress about how much ab work you’re not doing you’re likely making your belly even bigger. Stress makes us release cortisol which makes our bodies store visceral fat yet again.

5) Building muscle all over our bodies helps us rev up our metabolisms. The more muscle fibres we have the less likely we are to store sugar as fat.

6) We burn more calories working big muscles groups or doing multi-joint exercises (i.e. squats, push ups, rows) than doing crunches. Getting rid of fat means creating a caloric deficit.

7) Whether or not you eat a breakfast high in protein has a bigger impact on ab fat storage than a set of crunches. Try it out.

8) Building abdominal muscle under fat will give you a wonderful six pack that no one can see. People have six packs because they are lean all over.

9) Excess fat storage around our middles has more to do with hormonal imbalances and overall fitness than whether or not we can do 200 crunches in a row.

10) If you have lordotic posture, (i.e. sway back) your belly is going to spill over your hips and make your gut look bigger. If you don’t fix your alignment you’ll always look like you have more of a gut than you really
do.

So learn how to flatten your stomach the holistic and effective way!
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Jane Clapp