With that said, if you don’t want to take my advice, and instead choose to do crunches anyway, here are the results you can expect from performing hundreds of backbreaking crunches:

1. Zero fat loss.
2. Zero functional core strength.
3. One or more herniated discs.

Soldiers can forget about sit-ups. For the first time in 30 years, the Army has updated its fitness testing to better prepare soldiers for the demands of combat. [...]

The full sit-up goes for several physiological and safety reasons: They don’t do much to strengthen the core to translate to battle strength, and the full flex movement, the actual crunch part of the sit-up, puts an unhealthy strain on the back at its weakest point.

If you’re still doing crunches and/or sit-ups, stop doing them. Your back will appreciate it. Instead of worthless crunches and sit-ups, exercise your core more safely and effectively by doing compound total-body exercises that work your core as part of a functional unit, and also do static and dynamic plank exercises.

I present to you the abdominal crunch:

This exercise is pointless and dangerous. Remove this useless exercise from your workout program immediately. You’ll have stronger and fitter abs by doing static and dynamic planks as well as compound exercises that effectively work all of our core muscles together as a functional unit.

I just spent two and half hours reading through all your ab questions from last week and I must say I’m shocked…

…I didn’t realize how many people were still using crunches to try and get a flat stomach and six pack abs.

Unfortunately, I have bad news…doing crunches is NOT going to get you the results you want.

(Although you knew this already, of course, as so many of you also wrote in with frustration that the crunches were not working.)

So I’m going to prove today what you already knew, and that’s how you NEVER need to do crunches again…here are the 7 reasons: