Hello, Abs

Back in high school, I actually had decent abs. This was mostly due to a slightly insane ab routine I had to do twice a week in ballet class. The teacher would put on The Lonely Goatherd from The Sound of Music. If you haven't heard it, it's an incredibly fast song. Then we'd have to do crunches for the entirety of it, one on every beat. My friend and I calculated this once and it came out to about 300 crunches in less than 5 minutes. I'm not sure how I ever survived that.

Fast forward to today when I'm having a hard time doing any crunches. I have very few muscles in my lower back. This means it's hard to keep my back flat on the floor when I'm doing ab work. When my back arches up, I end up using my back muscles instead of my ab muscles to sit up. This results in pain - and not the good kind.

I do have exercises to strengthen my back that I've been doing, and they seem to be working. So over the weekend I decided to give my old crunch routine a go. Not the whole thing, don't worry. The routine itself was one I'd been doing for years that my ballet master simply sped up and made us repeat a few more times. It consists of eight crunches each in six different positions: both feet flat on floor, right leg straight up in air, left leg straight up in air, both legs straight up, legs straddled, legs bent at knee with lower legs parallel to floor. I decided to just go through it once to see how I felt.

The good news is that I survived, though I had to cut down to a partial routine for the next couple of days because my abs were absolutely killing me.

The better news is that a few days later, my lower back exercises finally seemed to kick in in a big way. Either that or my abs finally strengthened enough that 10 crunches no longer leave them fatigued. Either way, the last time I went to the gym, I was able to do my entire ab routine without using half of my focus to keep my back flat. This is definitely progress.

Now that I can actually work on my abs without injuring myself, I'm looking forward to getting back to a flat stomach. Assuming I can stay motivated.