Do you neet an Ab Lounge?

There have been a number of abdominal exercise products advertised in television infomercials over the years. The latest craze seems to be the Ab Lounge. Do you need one of these? Well, if you have a bad back or bad neck, the support an Ab Lounge or similar product offers may allow you to exercise your abs when it would otherwise be impossible.

However, if you have no limiting injuries, you may want to consider the fact that these products come and go. There might be a reason why last year's favorite ab product can be purchased for a hefty discount this year (if it's still available at all). This year it's the ab lounge, but what will it be next year? To work your abs with crunches and/or situps, you really need no equipment other than a weight plate to hold on your chest when the reps get too easy with just your bodyweight.

Many of the sales pitches for products like the Ab Lounge focus on the fact that some people experience neck pain when doing crunches. If you are one of these people, one option is to try holding your hands at your chest, rather than behind your head. This eliminates the tendency to pull your head up, which stresses the neck. Once you add weight, you'll have to do this anyway. You also may want to consider doing some neck strengthening exercises, as it would be best to have a strong neck AND abs. Also, rather than doing, say, 50 reps with your bodyweight, try doing 15 or 20 reps with a 25 pound weight plate on the chest. This would give the abdominals the same amount of work, and reduce the amount of time spent stressing the neck.

Many fitness professionals are going in a different direction

Lately, a big fitness trend is the use of exercise balls to work the ab and back muscles. Exercises are performed while resting on the ball, and the philosophy is to introduce instability to the exercises, causing many small muscles that are not normally involved in the exercises to become involved, and therefore be strengthened, allowing one to improve the strength of their entire "core", rather than just isolated abdominal or back muscles. This popular philisophy appears to be in total contradiction to the idea behind the Ab Lounge, which removes all instability from the exercises.