If you find yourself buying the latest fad exercise machine to work your abs, you may be wasting your money, according to a recent study commissioned by the (ACE).
Experts at the , used electrodes to measure the maximum voluntary contraction (MVC) of participants鈥 ab muscles as they performed crunches and used equipment including the , , , , , , , and . They also measured the effectiveness of exercises like the yoga boat pose, stability ball crunch, decline bench curl-up, captain鈥檚 chair crunch, bicycle crunch, side plank, and front plank. Ultimately, they found that none of the devices or exercises were more effective than the standard crunch.
鈥淚f you compare all the various gadgets to the traditional crunch, the crunch outperforms the majority of the exercise in terms of muscle activation,鈥 says Dr. Cedric Bryant, chief science officer at the ACE.
But that doesn鈥檛 mean you should stop using your Ab Roller if you like it. 鈥淚t doesn鈥檛 imply that the devices have no value; all of the devices in the study still engage ab muscles in a reasonable fashion.鈥
However, Bryant says, it鈥檚 important to note that this study looked specifically at the MVC in the major superficial muscles of the ab region, the rectus abdominis and the external obliques. Exercises like plank and side plank had low scores because they tend not to engage those muscles, and instead engage the deep transversus abdominus, which helps with a lot of functional movements and core strength.
鈥淭he moral to the story is, if you really want to have a complete ab training program, you really need several exercises, and not relying on a single exercise,鈥 Bryants says. For his part, he likes to mix plank exercises with crunch or curl-type movements. And he doesn鈥檛 need a machine for that.