Personal Fitness Exercise

When it comes to personal fitness exercises, it's never easy to start a training program and stick to it. This is especially true for those who 'want' to get in shape and look good, and even for some hardcore bodybuilders at times. You've probably heard this a million times: "you gotta stick to it!" It's that simple.

Every year by about March, April, people in the gym start saying "time to get cut for summer" or "gotta start work on getting my six-pack for summer." It's no easy task to get those ab peaks and valleys carved into your mid-section. So get doing those crunches and leg raise exercises to get the abs you want!

Actually, not really. Contrary to popular belief, crunches and leg raises are far from efficient abdominal exercises. If you think about it, your range of motion is very much limited to at most a 90 degree range: from you lying flat at 0 degrees, and at the top of the movement, your upper body is vertical at 90 degrees. The flat surface forces you to stop short of the full motion, robbing you off of the back range motion of your abdominals.

You need to perform the full range of motion to effectively develop the rectus abdominis, which is the long muscle of your mid-section that runs from your rib cage to the pelvis. This muscle pulls your rib cage toward your pelvis.

For the effective range of motion, you need to start the ab crunch with about a 30 degrees arch in you back. You first stretch your ab muscles, and then contract your abs against resistance, performing the full motion range. This ab fitness exercise is so much more effective than crunches. Doing ab crunches, start with your back slightly arched, this first stretches your abs, and then contracts the abdominals against resistance.

When people do leg raises, most of them do it with momentum and never add the hip roll at the end of the movement. They end up working the hip flexor muscles more than the abs. This ab exercise targets the lower section of your abdominals. Do this exercise on an incline surface. Start with your body lying flat on the incline surface, keeping your legs straight, lift them up and try to kick above your head. Do not swing your legs up, or you'll be using momentum. At the end of the movement, with your legs all the way up, add in a hip roll - try to lift your butt slightly of the bench. This adds in the last little bit of squeeze to your abs.

Having a six-pack isn't enough for a great mid-section. You'll need to work on your external obliques. This group of muscles may seem peripheral to your abdominals, but they actually take up more area than the rectus abdominis. An excellent personal fitness exercise for the obliques are ab twists. Like the crunch, just add a twist to it. Sitting with your back flat against the Ab Doer, grab hold of the handles, contract your ab muscles and crunch. As your body bends forward, twist your upper torso at the same time. Pull until your shoulder is directly over your groin area. You can either alternate side to side each rep, or alternate sets side to side. Exercise tip: at the bottom of a rep, give your obliques a squeeze and hold it for 2 seconds, then release and perform the next rep.

One of the best new personal fitness exercise equipment developed for working your abs is probably the Ab Slider. This piece of exercise equipment is a huge improvement over the Torso Track. Nowadays, there's probably a dozen variations of the Ab Slide machine such as the Ab Force, Torso Toner, Bally Torso Tightner, Fitness Quest Tone Wheel, and too many more. The Ab Slide targets and works your entire abdominal section in one movement.

Grab the Ab Slide handles, and place some sort of cushion under your knees for padding. Kneeling down, lean forward slightly so that while grabbing on the handles, your arms are perpendicular with the floor. Then slowly push the Ab Slide forward. For beginners, don't push out too far, or you will have a difficult time bring yourself back. For more advanced users, push the Ab Slide out as far as you feel comfortable. As you do more of this exercise, you will be able to push the Ab Slide out far enough that you are almost flat facing the ground. Tip: make sure you are not using your arms to push and pull the Ab slide, but lock them and use your abdominals to do the work.