SITUPS TO MAKE YOUR BELLY STRONGER
Report #7196
Situps can strengthen your belly muscles, but doing them incorrectly can hurt your back.
Situps should be done while you lie on your back with your knees bent enough for the soles of your feet to touch the floor. Place both hands on your chest and slowly raise your head off the ground. Then, slowly raise your shoulders around one foot and then lower them to the ground. Do this slowly ten times, rest a few seconds and then do two more sets of ten. After a week or two, this exercise will feel easy, so do it with a light weight, wrapped in a towel, held behind your neck. As you become stronger, you can use heavier weights.
There's no need to do more than 30 situps in one workout. To strengthen your belly muscles, you increase the resistance, not the number of repetitions. Keep your knees bent to protect your back. If you do a situp with your legs straight, you place a great force on the iliopsoas muscles that increase the arch in your back, which can damage the ligaments and joints in your back. If you have strong back muscles, you can keep the arch in your back down on the ground, which helps to protect your back from injury. If you have weak belly muscles, you can arch your back excessively when you sit up and increase the chances of tearing the structures in your back. You need to sit up only about one foot because going higher than that uses the quadriceps muscles in the front of your upper legs, not your belly muscles.
By Gabe Mirkin, M.D., for CBS Radio News
Checked 8/9/05