4 Common Ab Workout Mistakes

There are many common ab workout mistakes that prevent people from reaching their fitness goals. This is where a personal trainer can be really helpful. This articles shares tips and information on how to avoid the 4 most common abdominal workout mistakes.

The first abdominal workout mistake is attempting to spot reduce through ab exercises. This is probably the most common abdominal workout mistake. If you are performing ab exercises simply to reduce your stomach fat, then you are wasting your time.

Ab Exercises cannot magically get rid of stomach fat. Spot Reduction is the #1 Ab Exercise Myth. The weight loss industry keeps perpetuating this myth because it's profitable. But, the truth is that no amount of crunches or sit ups alone can magically give you a flat stomach. If you want to lose stomach fat, you need to take a comprehensive approach to fitness, fat loss, and weight loss by performing aerobic exercise, weight training, and eat a healthy diet.

The second workout mistake is not progressing your ab exercises. If you want to continually make progress and improve your fitness, then you must continually challenge your body so that you don't hit a plateau. As a personal trainer in the gym, I often meet people who have been doing the same ab exercises for months and months. Their ab training routine is boring, repetitive, and less effective.

When you start doing ab crunches for the first time, you may find that it's hard to finish one set of 15. But after a couple of weeks, 15 crunches will seem easy. Once your ab exercises become really easy, that's a sign that it's time to progress to a more challenging abdominal exercise.

A simple way to progress ab exercises is to increase the resistance on your abdominal muscles with weights, cables, inclines, or ankle weights. You can also progress your ab workout by using a more challenging workout technique such as supersets or circuit training.

The third common ab training mistake is not varying your ab exercise movements. When I first started practicing yoga, I remember reading about the benefits of exercising your spine in all directions- forwards, backwards, side to side, twisting left and right. If you want to have a healthy and strong spine, you must be strong in all directions. Since crunches are so popular, most people make the mistake of focusing solely on moving forwards to work their abdominal muscles.

In addition to doing exercises like crunches, you should also practice movements of the pelvis and legs like during marching, leg raises, or reverse crunches. You should also practice twisting motions like oblique crunches or bicycle crunches. You should also practice side to side motions such as standing side bends or moving side planks.

Also, try to vary the positions that you work your abdominal muscles. Every ab exercise should not be done while lying on your back. Practice exercises in which you're faced down like the plank or sitting as in Russian Twists. And also practice exercises from standing like cable lifts or cable rotations. Your body must do a variety of movements so, prepare for many different functional challenges by training your abdominal muscles in many directions and multiple positions.

The fourth common abdominal training mistake is actually overtraining. Your abdominal muscles are similar to other muscles, and sometimes more is actually less. You do not need to spend hours on end doing thousands of repetitions to achieve fitness improvements.

You can develop your abdominals by focusing on ab training 2-3 days a week. If you are a hard core athlete, you may be able to push your ab training to 4 days a week and still have adequate time to recover after your ab workout.

When you work any muscle really hard and you're super sore the next day, that's a sign to let that muscle recover before another intense workout. 6-12 sets 2-4 days a week is plenty for ab training. Of course, this is just a sample range for your ab workout. If you are a beginner 1-3 exercises for 1-2 sets gets you started in the right direction, and if you are at an advanced level, 3-4 exercises for 2-4 sets keep you super strong.

In a quest for perfection, we sometimes over train our muscles. Three signs of overtraining are persistent soreness that lasts for days, decreasing strength, or overuse type injuries such as tendonitis. Don't make the mistake of overtraining your abs.

If your goal is to get a great ab workout, remember that ab exercises by themselves cannot magically get rid of stomach fat. Also, remember to progress your exercises, use a variety of movements, and focus on a few exercises performed with great form.

Charles Inniss is a Physical Therapist and Personal Trainer. Visit his website to learn over ab-core-and-stomach-exercises.com/ab_exercises.html 100 Ab Exercises, and also learn ab-core-and-stomach-exercises.com/ab_workout.html tons of ab workout tips.