The untold story: abdominal and other secret workouts I've not divulged here

I've got some post-preliminary reports (since I've already given a preliminary report) on creatine and super shakes, but I'll hold off on giving those until after this coming Friday's strength-training workout--so as to compile a bit more data. Meantime, I'll fill in with the current entry.

The title pretty much says it all: have I told you everything we do in the way of fitness? No, not everything. I've focused on the major components of our fitness regimen, i.e., the cycling/stationary-bike stuff for aerobic and lower-body strengthening on the one hand, and the strength-training workouts we do for upper body on the other. But there are actually a couple of other fitness routines that we work in, one of which I've not mentioned at all (shame on me).

The one I have mentioned is walking. We do sometimes replace cycling/stationary-bike riding with walking (2 - 8 miles)--as I've pointed out in a previous entry. But what I haven't mentioned is that I additionally try to walk about 1.5 miles on days when we have our strength training (Mon. and Fri.) and also on our rest day (Wed.). It's not much, but with age and being involved in an otherwise sedentary field of work, it's good to get in any extra activity you can. So there's that.

But what I've not mentioned at all is our abdominal workouts. We actually go fairly light on these, spending 5 minutes or so on cycling days performing them. One set of exercises that we do are ones that were given to me by a physical therapist who I was seeing last spring about some back pain. There are some crunches in there, an exercise called "dead bug," another called "mermaid," and another called "bird dog." These are as much core-strengthening exercises as abdominal exercises, though, of course, the two groups of muscles are closely related. Some of the movements remind me somewhat of Pilates exercises.

The other routine we do is one we appropriated from the Power 90 program. It's called "ab ripper 100." And our old friend Tony Horton leads the exercises.

Here's the list of exercises (10 moves, 10 reps each): 1 crunches, 2. left side crunch, 3. right side crunch, 4. elbows to knees, 5. superman crunch, 6. leg lifts, 7. in and outs, 8. hip rock, 9. bicycles, 10. full body crunch.

Using this routine has gone well for us so far--though I do sometimes hurt my back doing ab exercises: both the ab ripper routine and the other set of exercises I got from the physical therapist are liable to cause me lower-back trouble if I don't do them carefully. At the moment, in fact, we're taking a break from all abdominal exercises since I hurt my back about 10 days ago or so. But that hiatus should end soon. As will be evident from the time signature in these still frames, the whole routine only takes about 4.5 minutes

Anyway, I have thought of stepping up the abdominal workouts a bit during part of the year. Currently, I'm considering whether to replace our current abdominal routines with "ab ripper x" (jeez I hate these titles! I think I'll just call it "abdomen firmer" from now on) for part of the year. That's about a 15 minute routine, so it'd be quite a bit more intense than what we do now. But hey, I'm up for doing it for 2 or 3 months out of each year.

That's still in the planning stages, though. Look for further updates on the abdominal exercise front later. And by the way, don't I need to include these abdominal exercises at least somewhere in my overview of our regime? Another note to self: P90X's core synergistics DVD might be a good one to work into the abdominal/core regimen on occasion as well, no?

UPDATE: I've discovered there's a slightly more advanced version of the ab ripper routine (level 200: 10 exercises, 20 reps.) we do--and it's even viewable on the 'net! Have a look here.