The last couple of weeks, I have received advice and opinion questions.  These concern exercise foundations and ideas for workouts.

    What is good positioning for crunches?   First off, it is always wrong to cradle your head in your hands pulling your neck forward in your contraction.  It is standard to perform a crunch with your arms crossed in front of you for beginner crunches.

 Simple adjustments with your arm placement can make the difficulty level change with good technique (pay attention to a relaxed neck alignment).  Once you have mastered good alignment where you feel your abs compress with a good crunch: Chest out, shoulders back, chin up, relaxed neck with distance between your arms. 

Place your fists on your temples and keep your elbows turned out.  A harder variation is to completely stretch your arms out atop your head. 

A quick tip to fix technique with any arm position is to lock your eyes on one spot on the ceiling and keep your head position static while performing a crunch raising your shoulder blades off the floor.  Pay attention to the squeeze. 

Plus, hard abdominals, not necessarily cut, can be achieved quicker by holding the contracted repetition about three seconds.

    What is a quick exercise to broaden the upper body?  Some trainers would agree that lat pull downs will develop a wider upper body to obtain the “V” build.  Lat pull downs are excellent to get that build over time though. 

A quick and efficient exercise to achieve this build is dips without rocking your body.  Dips should be a staple in your workout since it challenges you to lift your own body weight. 
If you cannot lift your own weight with any workout, get off the weights until you can.

 Dips allow deep development in your chest creating a line separating your chest from the ribcage, front delts in the extension, back delts in the contraction, and of course triceps. 
The slower you go, the more you get out of a dip allowing all the muscles used to really work all their ranges of motion in this particular workout. 

    Once again, I hope you find this advice valuable to make the most out of exercise routine.  Do not even pay attention to how heavy your weights are. Just keep good technique and a 20-pound-dumbbell can feel like 30 pounds.

 You must to push yourself to get the results you want.  Check out my work-in-progress blog to ask more questions and get advice at domsclassicfitness.blogspot.com

Dominic Moncada can be reached at [email protected]