Belly Fat Loser

DO those ab machines live up to their promise of being better than the common crunch or stitups? Some do. most don't. CHek out check out which ones will do the trick.

In my my previous post a few months back on the absolute best ab workout, I examined some popular medieval torture…I mean ab workouts, and showed why some popular ab exercises really aren’t nearly as effective as you’d think. The findings in that post were based on a San Diego State University study on the effectiveness of different ab exercises, as measured with a high tech piece of gear called an EMG machine, which measures the electrical activity generated by your muscles as they are used. The machine can tell how much electrical energy is generated by the muscles, and that correlates to how much intensity they are working with.

Those crazy researchers are at it again. Now there is a new study, this time looking at some of the most popular ab machines, many of which have risen to fame thanks to late night infomercials. It makes me wonder who that is up at 3am is also interested in improving their physical fitness, but that’s a question for another time.

Tested for their effectiveness at stressing your abs of steel were the Ab-ONE, Ab Scissor, Ab Swing, 6 Second Abs, Perfect Ab Roller and the Torso Track. You may have used some of these machines yourself, and you may even have one, tucked away in the corner of your spare room.

If you’ve ever wondered if those things really work, or they are the creations of a fantastic copywriter, the answer could be a bit of both, depending on which of the machines you’re talking about. Some of them actually worked better than the common crunch, which was used as the baseline for effectiveness in the results. All machines were measured against the crunch, and their score is the percentage of muscle recruitment compared to the crunch. The crunch gets a score of 100, and anything better than the crunch at working your abdominal muscles will score higher  than 100.

How did they fare?

The machines were scored for both their ability to stimulate the abs and obliques.

Machine        Abs    Obliques
Ab-ONE        126      113
Perfect Ab Roller      96        77
Ab Scissor          64      126
Ab Swing          35      117
Torso Track          70        98
6 Second Abs          63        85

You’ll note that some of these machines are nowhere near as effective at working those abs as the common, apparatus free exercise I reported on in my previous post on the ultimate ab workout. Some of those exercise are twice as effective as the machines.

Tags: exercise, exercise machines, workouts