Many of you have attended Boot Camp for more than 3 months now and we have yet to do a single exercise that resembles a crunch. With that said, many of you have also noticed your waistline shrinking and getting tighter without them. All of the core exercises we do are based on the principles Stuart McGill has widely researched and published work on. A flat, tone stomach has nothing to do with how many crunches you are doing everyday and every thing to do with the type and intensity of exercise you perform and what you're putting in your mouth! You CAN NOT out work a bad diet!So I encourage you to read the following article that explains WHY you will never have to do another crunch... The man who wants to kill crunches A Canadian professor of spine biomechanics rails about the dangers of the ubiquitous sit-up by Patricia Treble on Tuesday, January 19, 2010 9:00am
After three decades of figuring how out the spine works, Stuart McGill has come to loathe sit-ups. It doesn’t matter whether they are the full sit-ups beloved by military trainers or the crunch versions so ubiquitous in gyms. “What happens when you perform a sit-up?” he asks. “The spine is flexed into the position at which it damages sooner.” The professor of spine biomechanics at the University of Waterloo knows a thing or two about snapping spines. In his lab, McGill proudly shows off a machine that’s probably created more disc herniations than any other in the world. “We get real [pig] spines from the butcher and we compress them, shear them and bend them to simulate activities such as golf swings and sit-ups, and watch as unique patterns of injury emerge.” A disc has a ring around it, and the middle, the nucleus, is filled with a mucus-like liquid. Do a sit-up and the spine’s compression will squeeze the nucleus... Click the following to read the remainder of the article - http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/01/19/the-man-who-wants-to-kill-crunches/