Redux: Decline sit-ups with a twist
30 November 2006If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Sounds like an exotic drink, one with a little umbrella placed inside a lightly salted rim. This is a vicious gut exercise that purposeful primitives gravitate towards because, well, because it’s a vicious gut exercise and given a choice between easy and difficult, we’ll opt for difficult every single time. Crunches are handy and convenient and isolative and delicate and precise – and that’s why they are not all that great for the intended purpose; build and strengthen the abdominal muscles from crotch to solar plexus, including the external oblique muscles, the intercostals and serratus. Crunches have a tiny range-of-motion (ROM) and rely on continuous tension to impart the stress inroad. Decline sit-ups are difficult, quite cumbersome, compound multi-jointed, hardly delicate and require all the muscles of the abdominal region work together in an elongated and coordinated fashion in order to finish the assigned muscular task. So what is a decline sit-up? A bench with a downward slanting surface allows the athlete to double the range-of-motion (ROM) over the standard sit-up or crunch. This bio-mechanical fact doubles the results and benefits. Most commercial exercises benches sold in this day and age have the ability to incline, allowing the user to do incline presses, curls; 90-degree braced seated overhead presses – plus all manner of “flat bench” exercises. Most modern exercise benches also have the ability to decline, to allow the bench surface slant down and allow the athlete to lie braced with the head below the flat plane surface. This feature allows the user to perform decline bench presses (without a spotter and using a barbell this is a dangerous, needless, redundant exercise that should be exorcised from every PP training regimen) but we have a far better use.
Hook your feet under and around the legs of the bench or use the foot attachment that most benches come with. Now lean back – slowly – until the back of your head touches the bench pad. The slowness of the descent and ascent are critical to making this exercise a progress inducing continuous tension compound muscle group abdominal exercise. One you bottom out, arise in a slow purposeful fashion. Do not use thigh flexion to come erect! This device and procedure combine to create one of the most excruciating stomach exercises ever devised. The decline creates a dramatically extended ROM and a longer rep stroke pre-stretches the gut; first stretching the stomach then making it contract over the furthest possible pathway. When a purposeful primitive hears the word ‘excruciating’ used to describe an exercise, their ears immediately prick and they are drawn to the exercise like a starving bear to a bee hive. The modern decline sit-up is the grandchild of the infamous Roman Chair sit-up used incessantly by the great bodybuilders of that golden (relatively innocent era) of the late 60’s and early 70’s. Men like Frank Zane, Irving ‘Zabo’ Koszewski, Dave Draper, Sergio Oliva, Franco, Arnold, Danny Padilla and all the other physique immortals of that era would typically start or finish their regular weight workout with 100-reps of Roman Chair sit-up. The feet were held down by two floor stirrups and a padded bar was placed under the butt/hamstrings a few feet off the floor. The user would then sit or arch backwards before sitting erect. Zane reportedly could do 500 non-stop reps and Zabo supposedly could do them at a steady pace for a solid hour. ROM combined with slow rep speed is the key to our version.
The more time it takes to finish of a rep the more muscles are activated. Technically there are a long list of proper provisos and procedures…no bouncing off the pad at the bottom of the repetition to create momentum. Use a slow and controlled lowering of the torso; uncoil one spinal vertebra at a time. At the very bottom, lightly touch the back of your head to the pad and then sit erect using the identical rep speed used in lowering. Roll up in a very deliberate and concentrated fashion. Stop the upward path of the rep at the exact instant when stomach tension releases. You can sit totally erect and lose stomach tension completely and this is to be avoided. Sit up with great deliberateness then reverse direction and head back down with equal deliberateness. If you can do 10-reps on the first try in this ultra-concentrated fashion you are an abdominal terminator. Once you are able to do 20-reps using the straight up and straight down procedure, add the external oblique-stimulating ‘twist.’ At the commencement of every rep, turn as far as you can in one direction. Hold this twisted position as you sit up and lower. Use the slow-mo rep speed. This variation produces an unbelievable isolation and stimulation of the external oblique muscles – the muscles that lie beneath the love handles. At the bottom of each subsequent rep, twist in the other direction as far as possible and repeat the procedure. For those seeking admittance into the ‘He Man Club’ perform the decline sit-ups holding your hands overhead, like you were showing off on the rollercoaster. If you are a power god, hold a dumbbell overhead with your extended arms. Ultimately try the dumbbell version with a twist. Delightfully diabolical.
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