Dr. Andy Galpin

And again, I'm specifically referring to your spine here.

So there is some evidence, and this is controversial, but there is some evidence that high repetition loading with the lumbar spine during movements, like one can imagine sit-ups and things like that, has been linked to elevated risk of injury.

You can see those data pretty clearly.

At the same time, and I actually was an editor for a pro-con piece many years ago in Strength and Conditioning Journal, where people were arguing back and forth about whether or not the crunchy or crunch exercise specifically is safe or not.

you'll actually see evidence that it is plenty safe.

If done appropriately, if done right, flexion-based ab exercises are not necessarily going to guarantee back injury.

But if you're coming from a perspective or a population where you're trying to either deal with somebody who has back pain,

or people that are consistently getting it, I understand why you're super sensitive to that exercise.

Many people in that world do not like it, either because they've seen it cause pain or they're thinking, there's just other ways I can train those muscle groups, why run the risk?

But at the same time, that's not fair then to throw the exercise out completely and say things like it's going to cause back pain.

Hopefully that helps you understand a little bit of why that exercise specifically, and really what we're talking about is a broader concept of should I train the ab muscles more like my quads and other muscles, or should I have entirely different principles?

And what I'm generally trying to argue is

There are maybe some considerations, but I don't think throwing everything that we've ever known about training out is the appropriate response either because the data just aren't there.

It just does not indicate that that is necessary.

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