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Ab Exercises You Can Do Without

When it comes to ab training, you hear it all: Doing sit-ups with bent rather than straight legs takes the stress off your back and works your abs harder; the bicycle maneuver and the captain's chair are the "best" exercises for your abs; the hanging leg raise puts little or no stress on your lower back.

Unfortunately, conventional wisdom and the word in the gym isn't always accurate. Sometimes it's dangerous.

Abdominal exercises are usually recommended based on their capacity to work your abdominal muscles. However, this ignores the potential tissue damage that some exercises can cause, mainly through compressive loading to the lumbar spine (lower back).

In other words, while some exercises may be effective at working your abs, they're actually very bad for your back.

You probably know someone whose back "just went" while they were in the middle of a simple everyday task - picking up a pencil from the floor, lifting a bag from the car, or even just making the bed. Maybe it's even happened to you.

"Very few back injuries, however, result from a single event," says Professor Stuart McGill, an expert in spine function and injury prevention at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

Instead, most injuries to the lower back are the result of damage accumulated over time. And the event that appeared to cause the injury was - no pun intended - simply the straw that broke the camel's back.

The good news is that Professor McGill, along with Craig Axler, have identified a number of abdominal exercises that challenge your abdominal muscles while minimizing the compressive load to the lumbar spine...

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