Crunch With Medicine Ball

The crunch with a medicine ball adds resistance to a movement that stops being challenging surprisingly quickly. Once you can perform thirty clean bodyweight crunches, more repetitions train endurance rather than strength, and the only way forward is to load the movement. Holding the ball against the chest does exactly that, and holding it further from the hips increases the leverage against the abdominals if you want more without a heavier ball. The instruction not to rest the shoulders back on the floor between repetitions is what keeps the exercise honest, since touching down releases the tension and lets the next repetition start from momentum. Keep the movement in the trunk rather than pulling the head forward, and control the descent as deliberately as the lift. A ball of two or three kilos is enough to change the exercise entirely, so start light and add range before you add weight.