Ab Crunch Machine
Trains the Abs.
- Equipment
- A machine
- Mechanic
- Isolation
- Force
- Pull
- Level
- Intermediate
How to do it
- Set the seat so the chest pad or handles sit at the top of your chest and the pivot is level with your waist.
- Sit with your feet secured and take the handles or rest your arms on the pads.
- Start upright with your stomach braced.
- Curl your ribs down toward your hips, rounding the upper back rather than folding at the hip.
- Stop where the trunk stops flexing and hold for a moment.
- Return under control until you are upright again, without letting the stack drop.
Common mistakes
- Pulling with the arms. On most of these machines the handles are just where you hold on; if the arms are doing the work, the arms are also deciding how far the trunk travels.
- Folding at the hip instead of curling the spine. Bending forward from the hips with a straight back is a hip flexor movement the machine will happily let you do at any weight.
- Setting the pivot above or below the waist. The machine bends where its pivot is, and if that is not roughly where your trunk bends, the load lands somewhere between the two.
- Loading it heavily and shortening the range. The abdominal wall's job here is to shorten the distance between ribs and hips, and that distance is short — a heavier stack that halves it trains less, not more.