Sit ups. When training my clients, full sit ups are one of the exercises we dont do. The exercise is all wrong for me, yes it is good for your abs but it has the negative effect of putting too much pressure on the spine. Professor Stuart McGill, an expert in spine function and injury prevention at the University of Waterloo in Canada states that most injuries to the lower back are the result of damage accumulated over time, and not the actual act that puts the back out. The sit-up exerts extremely large compression forces on the discs in your spine. In a laboratory setting, McGill and his colleagues have shown that one of the quickest ways to damage these discs is to load the spine while repeatedly bending it back and forth, rather like a sit up. “The US National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health has set the action limit for low back compression at 3300 N; repetitive loading above this level is linked with higher injury rates in workers,” explains McGill in his book Low Back Disorders. “Yet this is imposed on the spine with each repetition of the sit-up.” Researchers also found that bending the knees rather than having straight legs made very little difference in lumbar spine compression. Researchers from California State University set out to test the effectiveness of several abdominal exercises. They found exercises like rollouts (using barbell/dumbells or the specific roll out device), the body saw (much like the plank but sawing the body back and forth) and stir the pot (using a aerobic ball) will train the same muscles as the sit-up, but with much less risk of tissue damage.
Posted on: Wed, 17 Dec 2014 18:38:57 +0000
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