Training Your Abdominals – Part 4: The Stability Ball

The stability ball, sometimes known as the Swiss ball is similar to the decline or abdominal board in that it is designed to add an extra dimension to crunches or sit ups. Of course, the Swiss ball can be used for a variety of different exercises, and we may come back to it when we talk about leg raises, but our focus for the moment is abdominal training and in particular, sit ups or crunches. They are reasonably priced too so make a great addition to your home gym.

The Swiss ball adds a number of additional elements to simple floor exercise crunches. Firstly, as the name suggests, the stability ball forces you to stabilize yourself on an unstable platform. This makes you, almost unconsciously use all your core muscles to remain horizontal on the ball. The other advantage that a Swiss ball can have is that it can give you a greater range of movement, safely, when you are performing a sit up. When you do sit ups on the ground or on the floor, there is more risk of lower back injury. The ground, or a board is flat, whereas your back is curved, and as you reach the bottom of the movement there is a greater risk that you will hyper extend your lower back. As you reach the bottom of the crunch movement on a Swiss ball, the ball tends to mold to match the curvature of your spine, which allows it to be supported while the tension remains on your abdominals. This allows a greater range of movement, training your abdominals from a full extension through to contraction, and makes a great exercise in anyone’s ab workout routine.

Position On The Ball

When approaching the Swiss ball, let it go find its natural point of rest. When it is steady, choose a point just under the pinnacle and sit on it. Your feet should be a little wider than shoulder width apart so that you have a stable platform, but not too wide – you need to let your core muscles do some of the work of keeping you stable.

Down…

As With The Floor Sit Up, Your Hands Should Be Crossed And Touching Your Shoulders

As With The Floor Sit Up, Your Hands Should Be Crossed And Touching Your Shoulders

As with the floor sit up, your hands should either be crossed and touching your shoulders, or on your thighs, ensuring that you do not pull on your head to create momentum. Allow yourself to extend backwards, using your abs to control the speed of your descent. As you go down, you should be able to feel the ball moving into the small of your back, and you may also feel the ball move forward slightly as your centre of gravity shifts back. Go down as far as you are comfortable with and feel your abdominals extend – there is no floor there, so if you allow yourself, you will continue back past the horizontal, and while the ball will support your back, it is by no means a guarantee against lower back injury. Break yourself in gently if the movement is new to you, and as you feel more comfortable, you can go further back in small increments.

…And Up!

Come up allowing your abdominals to do the work, not your lower back, and avoid bouncing or throwing your arms forward to create momentum. Keep the movement controlled and as you come back up, bear in mind that your legs are parallel to the ground, so you won’t get the same feeling of completing the repetition as you do when your elbows touch your knees when your legs are bent on the board or on the floor. Feel for the point when the load comes off your abdominals, i.e. just before you reach the point where you are vertical, and then start the return back down to the bottom of the movement.

Adding Weight

You can also do crunches on a Swiss ball with a medicine ball, dumbbell, or weight disc to add extra resistance. See Training Your Abdominals Part 3 for general principles of where to hold the weight, but most importantly remember that the higher you hold it, the more resistance there is, and the greater the strain on your lower back, and wherever you choose, keep the weight static so that the load remains constant on your abs. Bear in mind also that any weight you use you feel heavier than it would on a stable surface, because you will be working harder to keep yourself stable. You will realize that very clearly a day or so after the exercise – the first time I used weight on the Swiss ball, I had some fairly major DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness) because you really do work all your core muscles through a greater range of movement than you normally would on the floor or any other stable surface. Try it!

In my next blog on abs, we’ll talk about leg raises – one of the most effective way to train your lower abdominal muscles.