Exercise #5 Long Arm Crunches
While abdominal crunches are an absolutely fine exercise to perform, the long arm crunch is quite-frankly, better. It uses your arms to create extra resistance, working your abdominals much harder without any strain on the lower back.
Lie on your back with your feet flat on the ground, knees bent. Straighten your arms out and place them straight ahead of you parallel to the floor (i.e. not in the air). Your inner-arms should be touching your ears throughout the movement.
Keeping your arms in place, slowly crunch upwards until your head and shoulders are off the ground. Pause when you can feel the strain on your abs, then slowly lower your head and shoulders (and arms) down to the starting position.
You can make this exercise harder by adding a weight to hold, this can be anything really. It doesn’t need to be a dumbbell.
A No-Equipment Home Workout
Now that we have five exercises, we can put them all together into a home workout. Feel free to add more exercises from your own collection into it if you find the program a little easy.
Alternatively, you could increase the repetitions, and reduce the rest time between sets! Or you could search YouTube for progressions to each exercise (squat jumps instead of squats, walking lunges instead of regular lunges).
This program should last about 10-15 minutes, you should make sure that you have enough space to perform each exercise safely, and you will want a bottle of water to hand.
Home Workout
- Squats 3 sets of 10 reps
- Lunges 3 sets of 10 reps (each leg)
- Push Ups on Knees 3 sets of 10 reps
- Mountain Climbers 5 sets of 30 seconds (high intensity)
- Long Arm Crunches 3 sets of 10 reps