Why? Is there some risk involved?
I don’t see a problem in doing a couple sets of weighted situps or other weighted ab movements.
Here is what charlie said (from T-nation):
You have to think about the role of the muscle in the particular activity. The role of the abdominals is as a support structure where power is less important and endurance is much more important. Additionally, the overall drain on the limited supply of energy the body has to deal with is better served in this way.
Red muscle fiber is much more energy efficient. Now, I don’t presume to speak for bodybuilders since appearance is all that matters in that arena. But in sport, you’d be better served to reconvert those fibers toward a natural state rather than trying to train them as white fiber. What are we talking about here? High reps! These reps can be done daily as well, because when you do low intensity work you don’t have the 48 hour limitation that you would have on high intensity work.
My athletes don’t do hundreds of repetitions, they do thousands! We try to hit all of the muscles. This brings up another issue. In high performance sport the hip rotates toward the center line, meaning that there are rotational forces involved in the support structures as well. This requires all of the muscles in the abdominal complex to work.
Now, if you were doing high power (low-rep) work with the abdominals, then you could only work them straight ahead, as you would in conventional crunch-type movements or some variation thereof. This means that a large number of the muscles (obliques) would only be exercised through the crossover effect, meaning they wouldn’t be worked directly. They’d only receive some indirect benefits from the work of the muscles in the front.
If, however, you try to use power to develop these other muscles involved in rotational support you’d surely be injured.
Obviously, it’s a complex issue, and the type of training you do varies from sport to sport
I know Dan Pfaff has success with a Weighted Russian Twist series. I think the athlete would have more success including both methods weighted/unweighted instead of 2000 reps of crunches.
In terms of specificity, doing weighted crunches/situps/twists/leglifts would be more specific in terms of forces and time (10sec 100m to 50?sec 400m). And I don’t know anyone who has ever injured themselves doing a weighted twist.
My main problem with the ‘thousands’ thing is the time involved 30min/1000. And if TNT’s calculation of 2.5 hours is even twice too much, then that’s still over an hour for a muscle group that is “not biomechanically relevant to sprinting”. Surely that amount of time could be better spent training something that IS biomechanically relevant.
Regarding the time concern, have you purchased any videos here? In them you will find that the ab workouts are not simply crunches for thousands of reps. And TNT’s calculations of 3 seconds a rep is way off. The repititions were performed with multiple exercises in circuits with an up tempo space. At least a hundred a minute.
No, she would have done them at a faster tempo. When doing ultra high numbers, nobody would have the patience to do them that slow. She probably used momentum, and the psoas would have been doing a lot of the work. A lot of athletes do half between a sit up and a crunch at about 1 rep per second. Some times not going all the way up, and not going all the way down.
Don’t forget that Flo-Jo had a comparitavely short and light torso, compared to me and you.
Marion Jones crunches were often done with a light med ball in hands above chest, and using a slight arm swing, could add momentum to her crunches. And they were done at faster than 1 repetition per second, so no ‘squeeze’ at the top. But the number of reps creates a burn.
Football / soccer player, Christiano Ronaldo, regulary does 3000 sit ups a day. But I doubt he could cover the 100m in under 11 seconds electronicly. His speed is slightly over-rated, as he is quick on the ball, change of direction speed, agiliy, quick feet etc… but his straight line top-end speed would not have matched Theiry Henry’s etc.
[QUOTE=pierrejean;232637]The purpose of doing bunch of abdominals is not to improve speed but is part to a fitness enveloppe which includes coordination/strength/flexibility/therapy orientated, etc drills, a general and non-specific, albeit individualised, work for sprinting.
QUOTE]
I never did get this ‘fitness from sit ups / ab exercises’ concept.
Surely, when it comes to fitness, a simple jogging session, or a sprint session, forwards hops, or even just multiple reps of ‘strides’ would develope the fitness envelope greater than any amount of gym type abdominal/core exercises.
And the abs get good work from running anyway. How can an exercise where you lay on your back and just curl the torso, match the fitness gained from running? Maybe I’m missing something.
Ben Johnson’s 1 mile warm-up jog, or John Regis occasionally jogging for 2 miles, probably did as much for their over all fitness, as the high rep abdominal work. I honestly don’t know how one thousand sit ups is better than one thousand running strides.
Yet so many sprinters do these abdominal exercises, so I’m curious as to why. There must be a reason, or is it really a fear that ‘if left alone’ it could lead to problems? And so they macho their way thru high numbers of circuits, cause they don’t believe the track/field work is enough?
And as for occasionally needing to train indoors, why would sit ups be needed, if you can skip / jump rope, or even mimmick the jump rope action without even needing a rope?
Sure, high rep numbers in core exercises would build fitness, but there are far less miserable exercises, and far kinder on the lower back / psoas, that can get a very good job done on the fitness tangent.
I know you are not necesarily recomending high abdominal reps sitting on the floor, you are saying that ‘you need to do what needs to be done at a given time’ etc, I agree with that. But I just think there are better options than high rep sit ups, but don’t know for deffinate.
So what’s the point of using momentum??? What is this corssfit???
In high school, my younger bother did 1234 sit-ups and still holds the school record. He needed a pass from the PE teacher because it went into the next class session. 1234 sit-ups = more than 1 hour. My calculations are not way off.
Anyone have the guts to prove me wrong??? Didn’t think so.
TNT
[quote="“Goose232”]
I said it’s part of a fitness envelope, not the only aspect. Also, BJ or JR weren’t asked to chose between abs and running, they did both! Anyway, go with us for our indoor core circuit which has a repertoire of about 50 exercises (we don’t do them all), or our 300 abs with or without med ball performed after tempo, or the tempo runs with abs btw reps, you will see it’s really part of the fitness build up for us. Looking at the global picture, there are bridges btw those core exercises, the runnings, the throws, the jumps and the therapy, as well as pedagogical considerations.
You are talking about sit-ups. The thousands of reps came from many exercises. Your time is off.
[quote="“pierrejean,post:521,topic:40404”]
My question is this, how important is it to perform high volume ab work if the athlete is sprinting-jumping-throwing-lifting? I find ab work to be extremely boring and usually slack on it a lot. Seems like even at the lower levels athletes are performing 1000-1500 reps of abs weekly.
I don’t think there are many, if any, on this board that can do situps at 1/sec for anything over 100 situps. And I can’t see any valid reason to do 30 sets of 100 situps even if its spread out over the day. Its not close to being specific to sprinting and there are better ways to develop fitness that take a lot less time.
I did 1000 situps, 1000 push ups, and 1000 squats every night for 3 weeks straight…it pretty much took over my life. At the very best, I could knock out the push ups and squats in around 50 minutes by doing 20 of each on the minute every minute. The sit-ups, on the other hand, took FOREVER. The most I ever did continuously was 505 and that took 30 minutes nonstop. These exercises usually ended up taking hours upon hours because I broke it down into smaller chunks.
Were you a beast after those 3 weeks?
Doing it helped me regain some muscular development that I had lost from not lifting weights for over 6 months. I did end up losing weight though. I went from mid 190’s to 187. It made me look a lot more lean and defined and I was already very lean to begin with.
[quote="“Goose232”]
Sit ups equal jogging?
I once did 1000 sit ups in a row. It took me about 30 minutes.
we are not talking strictly about sit-ups.
I have to question if they were a true situp or a crunch, a terminology mix up maybe