THe Benefits of Doing Crunches

Crunches are abdominal muscles building exercise. They help to achieve a flat stomach by strengthening abdominal muscles. Crunches work up your abdominal muscles, and make them stronger and tighter. Crunches are an exercise which benefits you in two ways; indirectly by boosting your metabolism, and directly by burning calories.

At muscle level, your body breaks down when doing crunches. The soreness that you experience after crunches, are due to small tears that occur in your muscles during crunches. These damaged muscles are repaired by your body when you rest by

extracting calories from the fat deposits in the body and use them to repair the muscles. This process is repeated every time you do crunches, and the rebuilt muscles are firmer and stronger than before. However, crunches do not give instant weight reduction, but aid in overall weight loss. So, you may notice reduction in overall body weight.

Crunches versus Cardio Exercises

Crunches may lead to significant loss in overall weight. Are you already thinking of adopting it as your weight loss exercise program? Wait! You may have to do some comparison of its benefit to other weight loss exercise program such as cardio exercises. Crunches burn your calories when doing workout and when at rest, while cardio exercises burn your calories only when you are engaged in a workout. No calorie is burned when you are at rest. When doing crunches, the rate of calories burned is about 7calories per minute as against 5 calories per minute when doing cardio exercises. This goes to show that you burn more calories with crunches than with cardio exercises. But, how long can you maintain the rate of these exercises? It is easy for anyone to perform cardio exercises for about 35-45 minutes, while crunches can be performed for as little as 15-20 minutes. This means that in the long run you will burn lesser calories with crunches than with doing cardio exercises.

Increasing your Calorie Burning Rate

The amount of calories burned while doing crunches varies. This depends on your weight, the pace at which you do your crunches, and duration. You burn about 45 calories for a 10 minute workout. This can be increased to about 85 calories if you increase your workout pace. For the same exercise routine, heavier people are likely to burn more calories.

Increasing your target heart rate is one efficient way to increase your calorie burning rate when doing crunches. You can’t burn significant amount of calories when your heart is low. To get your heart rate to the target rate required, you need to warm up before engaging in crunches. Cycling for about 5 minutes for instance can get your heart rate to the required target rate.  To maintain calorie burning rate, do cardio exercise for about 5 minutes after performing crunches.

Crunches are beneficial in burning calories, but combining crunches with cardio exercises results in better benefits in burning calories.

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