I'm writing an article today on a topic that is pretty emotive among S&C coaches and physio's. It has been very widely reported that core exercises that induce spinal flexion (e.g. sit up's, crunches, russian twists etc.) are "bad" for the spine leading to problems such as disc bulges/ herniations in the lumbar spine as well as the shortening of rectus abdominus causing postural, glute and breathing dysfunction.
I have to say that until very recently I would have totally agreed with everything I've said above and would indeed never have programmed crunch type exercise's. It wasn't till I started working with Kevin Till (check out his blog at www.ktconditioning.co.uk by the way) that I questioned this. I was quite shocked to see Kevin using crunching exercises in his programmes, but instead of totally railing against this I decided that i'd be better off to go away and perhaps read more of the science out there before making a judgement.
So thats exactly what I went and did I went away and really tried to read around the area in more detail. But the surprising thing was that having read the research there is actually very little hard scientific evidence to suggest that crunching exercises lead to back pain, or any of the problems mentioned for that matter. The research that does support this is at best highly flawed with the majority of studies being performed on cadavers, the problem with this being that cadavers perform in isolation and in these studies were often exposed to totally unrealistic forces (thousands of repitions in a matter of hours). With this in mind it seems that maybe crunches aren't so bad after all? Further to this when you look at anecdotal evidence from around the world of sport people have been performing crunches for decades (if not centuries) with little or no adverse health affects. Indeed Cristiano Ronaldo performs a reported 3,000 sit ups a day!! With little or no injury problems.
In Summary
Whilst I am playing devils advocate a bit, I think that it is ok to perform some crunching exercises in programmes. Whilst they shouldn't take up the majority of your core training I would say that if roughly 1/5 of your core training is based around Spinal Flexion this is going to be acceptable (1/5 being anterior core training, 1/5 posterior core training, 1/5 rotary core training and 1/5 lateral core training). I certainly think that people need to go out and read the research on the area more as it seems to have been misinterpreted to some extent.
Ben
P.S. If you want to read someone much cleverer than myself explain the whole issue then check out this blog by Bret Contreras on T-Nation, it's long but goes into some serious detail.
http://www.t-nation.com/free_online_article/most_recent/to_crunch_or_not_to_crunch
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