In CrossFit, we sometimes hear the question: “What about abs? How come we rarely do crunches?” People are so used to the common, standard fitness routine of rotating work on specific body parts on certain days. Monday is Legs Day, Tuesday is Chest and Back, and so on. With CrossFit WODs, it’s obvious that those specific body parts get a good workout with many of our exercises. For example, squats are very clearly a leg workout, and pushups obviously involve working out your chest. But what about abs? You don’t often see them in the WOD lineup…. Do you?
According to crossfit.com, we are working out our abs more often than we think. Ab muscles, or “the core”, work to stabilize and support the body with most CrossFit movements: squats, deadlifts, the Olympic lifts, burpees, pushups, pullups (especially the kipping variety), etc. These movement patterns place greater emphasis on the abs working together with the rest of the body, and will result in stronger muscles than you would get with the isolation of crunches. Additionally, the standard CrossFit warmup includes 3 x 10-15 “situps” and those can be whatever you desire, although the full-range glute-ham situp is recommended.
If you want to get some abs like the gang in the picture up top, stop wasting your time doing mini-crunches, ab lounge, pilates, ab-roller, and the situp ball. If you want abs like these, start doing CrossFit. Any real CrossFitter can tell you, abs like this come from full body training with functional movements. No amount of ab specific exercise could ever make your belly look like this! Of course, A little zone/paleo meal planning wouldn’t hurt you either!
Today’s Workout:
Buy In – Front Squats 4 sets of 10 repetitions
Team WOD – “Row Row Row your boat”
• Teams can be made up of different Zone levels (i.e. Elite, Zone 1, Zone
3 can all be on the same team)
• Each team member must complete 4 rounds of the following distances:
Elite: 600m
Zone 3: 500m
Zone 2: 400m
Zone 1: 300m
• The winning team will be the one whose members have all completed 4 rounds of their chosen distance
Cash Out- 4 sets of 5-8 handstand pushups or holds of equal duration (modified to suit level)
