The death of the sit-up | Hacker News Reader

The death of the sit-up

theatlantic.com

40 pointsfortran7747 comments

Back in the 80s I was a spaghetti-thin teenager on a swim team. My brother and I went to swim camp, and they made us do about 500 sit-ups a day, often as a punishment, but also because they said it'd help our flutter kicks. All of us were extremely sore. We hurt too much to laugh. I sneezed once, and it was so painful I stopped halfway through.

My brother and I decided next year we'd be ready. We started with 50 sit-ups, and added five a week. Then five a day. Then twenty a day. He made it to 900, I got to 1000. Then I started working on my time, and got it down to 30 minutes. I added a hundred sit-ups on a piano bench, leaning my head back to the floor.

My abs were like cobblestones. A kid punched me in the stomach and hurt his hand. A cute girl told me with scorn that they were the only visible muscles on my body. It didn't help my flutter kick at all, probably because I didn't hook my feet under anything. My flip turns were Olympian. I'd make up a whole body length on every turn.

Three months before the next swim camp, I got so sick of sit-ups that I just quit. At camp they thrashed us with sit-ups again and I was as sore as I'd been the previous year.

The great French bodybuilder Serge Nubret used to do 2000 situps every day. I don't know what number he started at, but he just did as many as he could every day until he hit 2000. It took him around an year to get there, and then he did 2000 every day.

Abs help with dolphin kicks.

I’m surprised you didn’t get good abs just being on the swim team though.

So. What I take from this is that having a 6 pack won't help me seduce my wife. Good to know.

Try aiming for this:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/4d/1b/7a/4d1b7a32dbb0bf588037...

Damn dude, if the bar is set at "the sexiest man on Earth" then we're all doomed

My experience with climbing is that functional core strength is mostly about developing coordination while under tension, and learning to use my core more efficiently for various movements.

Moves that feel impossible one session can feel easy the next. Did I magically get 20% stronger over one recovery period? No, but my core got 20% more efficient at doing it's job for that particular move.

And if you see a climber with a 6-pack, they probably got that 6-pack from doing 6-pack exercises, and not from climbing. I've definitely built up some muscle around my abs over the last few years, but there is no 6-pack to speak of.

Body fat distribution and tendinous inscriptions, both genetic, are huge factors. It's not just a matter of muscle, you also need the fat layer on your stomach to be thin enough that your abs are visible.

I'm 59 and have a six-pack. They're made in the kitchen. If you have any muscle tone at all, and you're lean enough, you'll have very visible abs.

Indeed, i belive you need under 5% body fat to have a 6pack. Fior what it's worth this low fat % is no longer recommended for the over 65s as its harder to put on fat after 70, and illness can draw down your fat reserves very rapidly. Lack of fat reserves is a compoundong factor for the elderly.

Agreed, IME dedicated core exercises have modest/weak correlation with core strength relative to weight training/movements which force the core to do its job aka. stabilize the spine, and provide tension for the legs and arms to push against.

my functional strength, particularly as applied to my chosen sport (cycling), skyrocketed after I included a weekly yoga class. vinyasha/ashtanga, emphasizing isometric & isotonic stuff. I was already on a regular training programme in a Friel+Coggan style, this added a new dimension. I attribute a couple of race wins to the increased power-endurance under stress (i.e. in the drops chewing bartape), a lower & narrower ITT position, and even improved bike handling.

It's still around in some places, CrossFit gyms still include sit-ups and GHD sit-ups in their programming. But CrossFit and ill-thought movements go hand in hand.

I highly recommend the book “Body by Science” if you don’t like working out but want to make sure you stay healthy and build muscle without aiming to look like a body builder. I doubled my strength in just 4 x 15 min sessions (1 session a week). It blew my mind. The book explains why it works but I really didn’t believe it until I saw the results.

thanks! I'll check it out

Key Point from the Article:

The sit-up and crunch violate all of these principles. The exercise asks you to pick up something heavy, but because you’re lying on the ground and the heavy thing is your upper body, there’s no way for you to brace your core and shift the effort to the big, high-capacity muscles of your legs.

The best way to train your "Core" (both front and back) is to do some Yoga Asanas and Bandhas.

Didn't see it in the article but planks are just as good (if not better) with much lower impact.

The plank is mentioned toward the end:

“In the past decade, every branch of the U.S. military has begun to phase out sit-ups and crunches from their required testing and training regimens, or else they have made them optional, alongside more orthopedically sound maneuvers such as the plank.”

And once you can plank for a minute, you might as well do (modified or normal) push-ups.

And once you're doing push-ups you can progress it into the lizard or Spiderman crawl(contralateral motion forward while bringing the body to a lowered push-up position) and engage the legs, hips and shoulders.

Crawls in all their variants have become my go-to exercise because they are great full-body movements, can be done on many surfaces(tartan running tracks are my favorite, at least for outdoors), are easy to vary further by adding slope or directional changes, and are simple to make loaded by wearing a backpack and stuffing it with weight(just make sure it doesn't fall out).

I just stack plates on my back, weighted planks are great for building core strength for heavy DLs/Squats. V-holds / dead bug holds also awesome.

What about leg raises? Especially on the machine where you are lifted up a bit with your arms. I do decline crunches, should I stop?

On what basis are isometric exercises better? You might as well say that standing is better exercise than running. For injury prevention? Maybe. For health and fitness? Not so much.

Have you ever held a plank for, say, 60 seconds? I can't imagine someone who has suggesting that planks are to situps like standing is to running.

Yes. Ten minutes is my record. (That was the target, didn't aim for longer).

The point is that static exercise only builds strength at the particular muscular extension tested by the exercise. With planks your core remains weak for anything that doesn't resemble a plank, just as standing doesn't meaningfully improve your running.

On the basis of the principle of specificity: the major function of those muscles under load is not to provide rigidity to the trunk to help transmission of power, and the mechanism by which it does this is isometric (or nearly so in the case of e.g. carries) contraction.

Gah. s/not//

Understood what you meant. Most real world load situations though do not resemble a plank (not to mention that planks only exercise for load in once direction). Dynamic exercise builds strength at all muscle extensions.

*one

How long can you hold an L-Sit?

My gym had an online month-long "ab challenge" at the beginning of the Covid lockdowns. One of the 3 progressive exercises was increasing reps of sit ups. It was "too easy" on the first few days. Then it was more and more sweaty and painful as the days went on.

Good exercise when used for a specific routine like that.

What do I do to make my abs more visible within 13 days? I will go to the beach in 13 days and want to look "better". I have them already visible (around 12% body fat).

I do intermittent fasting and already work out 3 times a week (squats and pull up). Thinking to go to the gym everyday starting today and focusing on core exercices (planks and some sit up variations)

Thoughts?

Honestly, on that kind of timeline, your "best" bet is probably extreme dehydration. But, don't do that.

https://nypost.com/video/tattoo-artist-will-give-you-six-pac...

Scrupulously count your calories, and go on a 1500 KCal/day diet until you can see them.

> What do I do to make my abs more visible within 13 days?

My honest advice: nothing. Going to the beach should be about enjoying the beach, the weather, etc; not about what some random person may think about your muscle or lack thereof. If that's really what they care about, they're probably not worth worrying about.

Don’t. You’ll be fine.

So what is the best exercise for great abs?

Flags are awesome.

Dragon flag https://greatist.com/fitness/dragon-flag

Human flag https://www.onnit.com/academy/so-you-want-to-do-a-human-flag...

But there are tons of great abdominal exercises, all with different benefits depending on your goals.

The sit up is such a specific motion, that it really has very limited benefits. Stabilization type exercises will benefit more. Some exercises will help with core strength alot, without being directly "ab" exercises. Heavy weighted squats are a great example of this.

If your goals are only to get a 6pack then you don't need ab exercises as much as you need a very disciplined diet supplemented with lots of cardio.

I would like to add that these are quite difficult unless you have a baseline of some athleticism. If you’re just getting into fitness these are going to be too hard.

For 6 packs, good diet and being lean/athletic is all you need.

Ab rollers are good. Start kneeling then progress to standing.

Also hanging knee lifts, leg lifts, and l-sits.

L-sit pull-ups are great for time efficiency. Those are mainly what I do for core these days, along with some squats/deadlifts, and it seems to be enough to maintain pretty strong abs.

Abs aren't built in the gym, they're made in the kitchen.

Fork put-downs and table push-aways.

Check out hollow-body holds- you can adjust them easily to adapt to your strength level.

I worked through this program and found it pretty easy:

https://twohundredsitups.com/

I ended up doing a set of 500 a day for 6 or so months before losing interest and focusing more on my primary exercise, long-distance running.

I’ve found that people love to find an excuse to not do a specific exercise. For any exercise, you’ll find an article that says it’s terrible for whatever reason.

> I’ve found that people love to find an excuse to not do a specific exercise.

Organizations too! The military, arguably one of the most physical and metric-oriented organizations stopped relying on the sit-up due to injury rates when recruits trained for sit-up tests.

Yes, except the military replaced sit-ups with other exercises. The average smug rando who says “sit-ups cause injuries” is likely in worse shape and suffers from more injuries than the person actually doing sit-ups.

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