How to do Great Ab Workouts at Home: The Best 5 Crunch-less Abs Exercises for a Flatter Stomach in Less Time

by Craig Ballantyne, Men's Health Training Advisor, Author - Best Home Abdominal Workouts for Six Pack Abs

If you never do another crunch again, you will end up saving a lot of time and you’ll still lose stomach fat and be able to get six pack abs. Why? Because crunches don’t work very well for building 6-pack abs.
There are many better exercises, and you’re going to discover the best 5 bodyweight exercises for a crunch-free six pack ab workout program. After all, if they did work, you wouldn’t have to do them for 30 minutes like the bodybuilder magazines suggest.
Instead of wasting your life lying on your back doing an exercise that you can do hundreds of times, you need to replace crunches and all those other aerobics-era exercises with better, total-body ab exercises to get more results in less time.

There's a downside to standard crunches!
The other dark side of crunches, aside from them being useless for getting six pack abs, is that the crunch movement itself is actually HARMFUL to your spine and low-back. Every single time you perform a crunch, you are doing what the world’s leading experts on back pain describe as a dangerous motion.
You see, every time you crunch, you do what is called spinal flexion, and spinal flexion compresses the disks between your vertebrae. If you do that too much, you could end up with a herniated disc. After all, it’s the same motion as rounding your back to pick up something off the floor, and you probably know someone who has hurt their back that way!

 So you don’t need to do crunches, and you don’t even need to go to a gym, if you have the right total body ab exercises in your home abdominal workout program. In fact, with the right program, your entire fat burning resistance training workout will take less time than most bodybuilders spend on crunches every day! Yet you’ll still be able to get a flat stomach and six packs abs with this fast at-home workout. 

Plus, you won’t be doing long, slow boring cardio. Actually, your entire workout (resistance training plus abs plus interval training) will take less time (less than 45 minutes) than most people spend on slow boring cardio. 
And you only have to workout three times per week, not six days per week like the bodybuilding magazines suggest. So you save time in each workout, and workout fewer times per week. That will give you more time to spend showing off your abs at the beach or anywhere else you please.


Here are the top 5 exercise replacements for ineffective aerobics-era crunches…

 1. Replace Crunches with Stability Ball Rollouts. You’ll get a more powerful stretch in the Rollout exercise, and a more powerful contraction, all without doing excessive and dangerous spinal flexion.

 2. Replace Crunches on the Ball with a Plank with Arms on the Ball. 
According to the Men’s Health magazine, research shows that a Plank with Arms on the Ball is 30% more effective in working your abs.

3. Replace Bicycle Crunches with X-Body Mountain Climbers. 
This unique total-body ab exercise still works your obliques, but without repetitive crunching. Plus, it helps build invaluable abdominal endurance and stability to keep your low back healthy.

4. Replace Reverse Crunches with Stability ball Jackknives. 
You will still be able to work the lower area of your abdominal muscles, as well as your obliques with this Stability Ball exercise, but you also get the benefit of building back-protecting abdominal endurance.

5. Replace Sit-ups with Hanging Knee-ups or the advanced Pull-up Plus Knee-ups. 
Your abs will have never experienced anything like this exercise! You can also do a Chin-up Plus Knee-up for the same effect on your abs, and Chin-ups are a little easier. This is one of my current favorite exercises.

By getting rid of crunches you’ll lose nothing, while gaining time to work on better exercises to build your six pack abs and flat stomach, plus you’ll avoid exercises that are hard on your back.
Combine these total-body ab exercises (that burn more calories than crunches anyways) with superset resistance training and belly-fat burning interval training and you’ll get more ab results in less workout time!
For more detailed descriptions of all of these home ab exercises as well as more techniques for losing abdominal fat, click here for more great abs training secrets