Bender Ball Method

We used to do sit-ups, but because sit-ups are not as efficient and can even hurt your back, we now try and do crunches, also known as curl-ups. These are an excellent method of strengthening the abdominal muscles.

What you do is lie down on your back, place your hands either crossed over your chest or cupped behind your head as a shelf to support your head. Care should be taken not to exert pressure on the back of the neck or back of the head. Excess pressure could cause neck injury.

Bend your knees up toward your body, and then curl up your shoulders. There is no need to lift your back off the floor. Merely lifting your shoulders and bending towards your stomach will exercise your abdominals. And since you are not lifting your back up off the floor, your hip muscles remain relaxed. All the effort you are exerting is going into strengthening your abs.

There are many variations on crunches that we will be discussing in the future.

You know, no one does sit-ups anymore, but do you know why? The object of sit-ups is to strengthen the abdominal wall muscles by using them to bend the spine up and off the floor. However, two other things happen that not only do not contribute to strengthening the abs, but can actually make things worse.

First, when you pull up the spine off the floor, a lot of pressure is exerted on the lower back, or the lumbar region. The weight of your body and the compression of the vertebrae are not such good things for the back.

The second problem is that when you pull up all the way off the floor you also bring the muscles of the hips into play. This reduces the workout you are trying to give your abdominals because the hips are joining in with the effort, helping the abs and taking away from the efficiency of the exercise that you are doing.

Nowadays we do crunches.

One of the more challenging problems of exercise is effectively targeting  the right muscles for strengthening. Core training is the Bender Ball method of sculpting those abs into the strong, healthy muscles that they should be.  This sculpting is accomplished with Leslee Bender’s unique method of Selective Stabilization , which produces the great results you want.

The Bender Ball Method has helped me personally achieve my fitness goals in just a few minutes a day. It is fun, fast and easy to use and results will spurn you on to greater and greater strengthening of those pesky abdominals that seem to give all of us so much trouble. I would recommend The Bender Ball Method to anyone who has ever dreamed of having strong abdominals but just hasn’t been happy with other ways of getting them.