Location: London, England | Hi there,
These are the exercises I recommend, although if you look at the latest research ,using the stability ball may not be a good idea-i think Leibenson is mis-quoting or misunderstanding McGill's work. The object should be to carry the good work you do in your exercises into yoga postures-no yoga posture will be good for you unless you use the abs in the same manner which the rehab exercises are trying to facilitate.
just a note on the stability ball crunch-the rectus muscle is made up of pockets of muscle, not like the biceps, which stretches from the shoulder to the elbow-so if the rectus muscle was designed to enable us to do a crunch, then it would be designed like the bicep-so obviously, it was designed to do something else. Stability balls may train the rectus muscle completely non-functionally, because the range of motion that the muscle goes through is even greater than on the floor. As you can imagine, this won't go down to well with all the PT's and physios who have been using the stability balls as the holy grail for a number of years. I personally think that the ball is a fun piece of equipment that allows people with sometimes modest amounts of training to sound clever, so they are going to be fairly upset when it's found these devices are questionable-not always, but quite often. Find out about the plank exercise if you really want something that trains the abs functionally-works much better than the ball.
Take care
Nick |