Ab workouts are considered one of the few sorts of exercise that some persons are instinctively drawn as to if they’re dedicated lifters or not. Many individuals use ab exercises as an entry point into some variety of regular exercise, which is great. Hopefully they eventually move on to include training their other body parts, but a start is a start.
Whether it’s performing crunches before breakfast or sit-ups before bed, some people make consistent ab training a priority. Some even take it a step further and use progressively more difficult exercises, which is where the bicycle crunch often appears.
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By combining a rotational upper body movement with lower body coordination, the bicycle crunch can effectively train your abdominals and oblique muscles in unison. This makes it an efficient muscle-builder while also creating athletic core strength that may carry over to performance on the sector, within the ring, or on the lifting platform. Here’s the best way to get essentially the most out of this entire core-builder.
Bicycle Crunch
Tips on how to Do the Bicycle Crunch Step By Step
The bicycle crunch may appear to be it requires “pat your head and rub your stomach”-levels of total-body coordination, however it doesn’t. Break the exercise into its component parts and you possibly can learn the technique.
Step 1 — Lie on the Ground
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Lie face up on the bottom along with your legs bent at roughly 90-degrees. Your feet must be within the air along with your toes pointed up. Rest your head on the bottom and convey your hands to your ears. Let your fingertips barely touch your head behind your ears along with your palms facing the ceiling.
That is a well-known setup for a lot of ground-based ab exercises whether it’s a full sit-up, crunch, or any related variation. Some exercises would have your feet planted flat on the bottom, however the bicycle crunch requires your legs to start within the air.
Form Tip: Don’t interlock your fingers and cradle the back of your head. This might put you in position to unconsciously crank your neck to finish repetitions. Your fingers should evenly touch the perimeters of your head or your ears.
Step 2 — Pedal the Bike
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The bicycle crunch gets its descriptive name from the lower body motion that appears much like riding a motorbike. Contract your core muscles to boost each shoulders barely off the bottom. As your torso comes up, bring your left leg up and in toward your upper body.
At the identical time, “crunch” your upper body forward and lean your right side toward the approaching leg. The range of motion might be relatively short, so concentrate on bringing the other sides together.
Don’t overfocus on reaching your elbow to your knee. That may result in flapping your arms with reduced core activation. As a substitute, take into consideration bringing one shoulder toward the other knee although they don’t need to truly touch at the highest of the movement.
Form Tip: Visualize an X-shaped band across the front of your body. As you progress, take into consideration each line drawing one leg and the other shoulder closer together.
Step 3 — Repeat the Rhythm
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After a robust contraction at the highest, extend your left leg forward while lowering your upper body to the ground. When your shoulders are on the bottom and your leg is returned to the starting position, easily transition to repeat the movement with the opposite side.
Draw your right leg toward your torso while crunching your upper body forward and leaning the left side of your body into the approaching leg. As you complete multiple repetitions, alternating sides with each rep, you could eventually discover a natural rhythm not unlike the rhythm needed to pedal a motorbike easily.
Form Tip: Perform each repetition slowly at first. Give attention to the cross-body activation and core recruitment. As you turn out to be more comfortable with the movement, progressively increase the speed without sacrificing the standard of individual reps.
Bicycle Crunch Mistakes to Avoid
Since the bicycle crunch involves your legs and torso working together, there are several opportunities for things to go fallacious. Listed below are some big issues to look at out for.
Elbows Flapping
Some people misinterpret the cross-body motion of bringing their legs and upper body together, and find yourself swinging their upper arms and elbows toward their knee as an alternative of activating their abdominals.
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This not only reduces the work done by your abs, however it may potentially strain your shoulders or neck. Keep the movement strict, maintain concentrate on feeling your abdominals working to crate the movement, and don’t make it a priority to force your elbow and knee to the touch in the course of your body.
Avoid it: Keep your hands very evenly against your head, which is able to make any shoulder or elbow movement more noticeable. As you crunch, keep your elbows “back” nearly in step with your ears. Don’t allow them to point forward.
Shoulders Stay within the Air
One bad habit some people develop when performing high-rep sets of bicycle crunches is holding an ab contraction, remaining in the highest of a crunch position, while “pedaling” their legs and explosively rotating their shoulders forwards and backwards.
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While this will potentially increase some work in your oblique muscles, you’re short-changing your abdominals since you’re holding a static contraction as an alternative of working through a spread of motion.
Avoid it: Treat each phase of the movement as separate parts — crunch and twist in a single direction, lower fully, crunch and twist to the other side, lower fully again, repeat. Don’t attempt to rush through the set by completing reps as quickly as possible.
Not Enough Leg Movement
The bicycle crunch requires you to drive one leg up with each repetition. Performing the upper body movement without also “operating” your lower body changes the exercise. As a substitute of a bicycle crunch, it becomes a comparatively more basic twisting crunch.
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This could be an efficient exercise by itself merit, however it doesn’t offer the identical lower ab and hip flexor recruitment of the bicycle crunch. (1) When you begin a set desiring to get the advantages of the bicycle crunch, ensure that’s the movement you find yourself performing.
Avoid it: In case your legs aren’t moving, you’re not performing a bicycle crunch. With each repetition, draw your leg in toward your upper body and extend it as the other side moves.
Tips on how to Progress the Bicycle Crunch
Although it’s a body weight exercise, the bicycle crunch could be considered relatively advanced since you’re operating your upper and lower body together. Work as much as the complete movement by mastering these foundational movements.
Crunch
Arguably essentially the most fundamental ab exercise of all time, the fundamental floor crunch is a necessary movement to be acquainted with. The crunch offers lower body stability, along with your feet firmly on the bottom. The movement also enables you to zone-in on creating a robust abdominal contraction over a brief range of motion.
Ensure not to show the crunch right into a full sit-up by raising your torso too high. The sit-up may also be an efficient exercise however it won’t carry over as directly when constructing to a bicycle crunch.
Twisting Crunch
As mentioned earlier, failing to properly incorporate your legs into the exercise turns the bicycle crunch right into a twisting crunch. Nonetheless, you possibly can flip that situation around by deliberately performing the twisting crunch as a method to construct up core strength for the more advanced bicycle crunch.
By learning the best way to crunch “up and over,” you’re recruiting your obliques and abdominals right into a single movement. If you turn out to be comfortable and capable with the twisting crunch, add the alternating leg movement to evolve the exercise into the bicycle crunch.
Advantages of the Bicycle Crunch
The bicycle crunch recruits your entire core by involving your upper body and lower body with rotational movement. This makes it a flexible and effective exercise for a lot of fundamental goals.
Core Strength
Athletes in traditional sports, strength sports athletes, and recreational lifters can all profit from a stronger core. Core strength has also been shown to assist reduce lower back pain. (2)
The bicycle crunch could be an efficient addition to a comprehensive core-strengthening routine. The exercise works upper and lower body coordination and strength transfer, while also activating the obliques, which may play a serious role in lots of athletic movements from running to throwing.
Ab Muscle Development
The upper abdominals are recruited in lots of ab exercises, however the lower abs are only heavily activated when the hips and lower body are involved in a given movement. The bicycle crunch achieves this increased muscle activation through repetitive leg movement.
The twisting motion of the torso also prompts the oblique muscles, that are strongly recruited during rotational movements. Since it maximizes activation of several different ab muscles, the bicycle crunch is a really comprehensive body weight ab exercise.
Muscles Worked by the Bicycle Crunch
Most ab exercises, as expected, train your abs. The bicycle crunch kicks it up a notch by involving rotational movement which also recruits the obliques on the perimeters of your abs.
Abdominals
Your abdominals, or rectus abdominis, run along the front of your torso from the underside of your chest to your hips. The abdominals are technically one single muscle with various muscle insertions, which suggests the muscle must be trained with quite a lot of movements for complete development. (3)
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Essentially, movements focused on curling the trunk with a stable lower body will emphasize the “upper” portion of the abs while movements that emphasize curling the hips with a stable upper body, equivalent to a reverse crunch, are simpler at recruiting the “lower” section of the muscle.
Obliques
The obliques are a pair of muscles on either side of your abdominals, near your hips. Your obliques primarily work to rotate your torso, in addition to resist rotation. The oblique muscles are also activated side side flexion — bringing your shoulder closer to your hip in a sideways motion.
Throughout the bicycle crunch, your obliques are strongly recruited as your torso twists within the direction of your approaching leg. So-called “love handles” are typically body fat that your genetics have decided to store near your oblique muscles. Contrary to popular myth, training your oblique muscles is not going to create love handles.
Tips on how to Program the Bicycle Crunch
As an efficient ab exercise, the bicycle crunch can discover a home in any well-planned ab workout. Listed below are a number of guidelines to get much more profit.
Unweighted, Moderate to High Repetition
The character of the bicycle crunch movement doesn’t lend itself to adding external resistance. Wearing a weighted vest can impede torso rotation and adding leg weights will excessively fatigue your smaller hip flexor muscles before targeting your ab muscles.
To get essentially the most out of the exercise, use only your body weight as resistance and concentrate on achieving a robust muscular contraction with each repetition. Try completing two to 4 sets of 10 to twenty repetitions. Count once to either side as a side rep — left leg to right shoulder followed by right leg to left shoulder can be one single repetition, not two.
Body weight Circuit
Since the only “equipment” required to do the bicycle crunch is a transparent section of floor, the exercise makes an efficient addition to a body weight exercise circuit (technically a workout complex, if all of the exercises are bodyweight-only). For a fast and effective conditioning workout, try the next for 3 to 5 total circuits.
- Reverse Lunge — 10 reps per leg
- Push-up — 15 reps
- Bicycle crunch — 20 reps
Bicycle Crunch Variations
Whether you’ve mastered the bicycle crunch or need one other complete core-building exercise to enhance it, listed below are a number of the most similar movements.
Hanging Scissor Kick
The scissor kick is a dangling leg raise variation. It involves dynamic motion, alternating your legs with each repetition. Although your upper body isn’t actively involved in performing a crunch, you possibly can still profit from a cross-body movement — especially when you “angle” your kick barely toward your opposite shoulder.
Don’t let your grip strength limit performance. If mandatory, use lifting straps to secure yourself to the overhead bar. The exercise may also be done along with your elbows supported at a “Captain’s chair” knee raise station.
Cable Woodchop
The cable woodchop, specifically the high-to-low variation, strongly recruits your obliques with stabilization assistance out of your abdominals. Your lower body provides a stable base, while pivoting in your feet creates a robust transfer of power for greater athletic carryover.
The low-to-high woodchop variation might be used for variety, but may excessively recruit your shoulder muscles. The low-to-high movement also requires less ab and oblique involvement in exchange for more lower and upper back activation.
Dead Bug
The dead bug can have one of the crucial visually descriptive exercise names of all time, however it’s also an underrated movement for core strength. It appears much like be a “slow motion bicycle crunch” because of the cross-body movement and arm/leg coordination.
One key to getting essentially the most from the dead bug is to maintain your lower back flat on the bottom. In case your lower back arches, you significantly reduce the core strength advantages. To remain focused in your lower back position, be sure you crawl and deliberately, unlike the usually more fast-paced bicycle crunch.
FAQs
Will doing the bicycle crunch daily give me a six-pack?
Sorry, but no. Doing any sort of ab exercise is not going to, by itself, offer you an outlined set of abs. Nonetheless, it might be one a part of the method. For optimum results, it is advisable pair ab training with a well-designed program that trains your entire body.
More importantly, it is advisable be following a calorie-controlled nutrition plan that’s designed to burn fat. You’ll be able to train all you wish and follow the “perfect” fat loss workout, but and not using a strict eating regimen, you won’t see the outcomes you’re after.
What number of ab exercises should I do in each workout?
This is determined by your overall training program. If you’ve gotten one workout per week dedicated to training abs, you may have the opportunity to slot in 4 of 5 exercises — preferably targeting a spread of various movements and muscle sections.
When you’re adding abs right into a larger session like a shoulder workout or arm day, one or two exercises must be plenty. Since the bicycle crunch works your entire abs and obliques in one-go, it’s a wonderful selection for this approach.
References
- Sarti, M. A., Monfort, M., Fuster, M. A., & Villaplana, L. A. (1996). Muscle activity in upper and lower rectus abdominus during abdominal exercises. Archives of physical medicine and rehabilitation, 77(12), 1293–1297. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0003-9993(96)90195-1
- Smrcina, Z., Woelfel, S., & Burcal, C. (2022). A Systematic Review of the Effectiveness of Core Stability Exercises in Patients with Non-Specific Low Back Pain. International journal of sports physical therapy, 17(5), 766–774. https://doi.org/10.26603/001c.37251
- Escamilla, R. F., Lewis, C., Bell, D., Bramblet, G., Daffron, J., Lambert, S., Pecson, A., Imamura, R., Paulos, L., & Andrews, J. R. (2010). Core muscle activation during Swiss ball and traditional abdominal exercises. The Journal of orthopaedic and sports physical therapy, 40(5), 265–276. https://doi.org/10.2519/jospt.2010.3073
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