Weight Sit Ups

With the use of a weight, sit ups increase in difficulty, making the exercise more challenging and effective for the muscles. Lots of people use weighted sit ups when they've passed the beginner or intermediate training stage, and they need something more to push the limits of their body. If you introduce a weight, sit ups can be perform both on the floor or on a piece of equipment known as the sit up bench.

So what are weighted sit ups and how do they help you? Well, to put it very simply, weighted sit ups are merely sit ups done using weights to give you more resistance when you are doing the sit ups. And in many cases you are doing the full sit ups instead of merely the crunch version of the sit ups. The exercise is performed as followed:

You get a weighted pole and you hold it beside your head in a very tight grip. Then you raise the shoulder blades off floor or off bench and you go halfway towards the knees. Then you lower back without touching the bench or the floor. The abs have to do all the work regardless if you use weight sit ups or regular exercises. For more resistance, you can use the sit up bench and incline it to a 30 degrees angle off the horizontal. That will increase the difficulty making you work harder.

You can also hold the weights in your hands, at about chest level. Make sure that neither the hands nor the weight are resting on the chest. The most important part of the exercise is not the sit up as we are first inclined to believe, but the falling back down. It is at this part of the exercise that the abdominals work the hardest, and it is crucial that you control the decent making it as slow as possible. The control results from the intense contraction of the abs. That's when thanks to the use of a weight, sit ups increase in efficiency.

When you are a beginner, it is counterproductive to introduce a weight. Sit ups can be difficult enough at such a stage, without trying to increase the effort further more. It is only when you are strong enough and capable of doing all sorts of sit ups, from various difficulty ranges, that you can venture to weight training as part of abdominal training routines.