What Kind of Exercise Machine Works Your Abs and Strengthens You?

An effective ab routine works all your abdominal muscles -- your upper abs, lower abs and obliques. That's why it's important to know which exercises work which parts of your abs and are most effective for building muscle. There are exercise machines at most gyms that strengthen your abs. Some isolate your ab muscles, while others recruit more muscles, increasing your total body strength. It's important to do a variety of ab exercises for best results.

  1. Ab Crunch Machine

    • To avoid a strength-building plateau, you need to continuously increase the intensity of the exercises you do in your workouts. You can do this by adding resistance weight. It's not easy to hold free weights while doing ab exercises, but ab weight machines that mimic the crunch exercise isolate the abs and use them to lift weight. A typical ab machine at the gym requires you to sit upright in the machine like you're on a chair and crunch to lift levered weights. The Smith machine helps you add resistance to a crunch from more of an actual crunch position while lying on a bench. It requires you to grasp a weighted bar and do a crunch, aiming to lift the bar as high as possible by lifting your torso as high off the bench as you can.

    Captain's Chair

    • A captain's chair machine isolates your abs. According to a 2001 study by San Diego State University biomechanics researchers, the captain's chair exercise was determined to be the second most effective exercise for your abs and the most effective exercise for your obliques. Hold yourself up by your forearms, resting them on the arm padding. Lift your legs by flexing your hips, tucking your knees into your chest and then lower and straighten your legs again. You can also use a horizontal bar to do the same exercise. To make it more challenging, lift the legs to a 90-degree angle. For an even harder variation, pull your chest up to the bar, keep your entire body in a straight line and try to make a 45-degree angle with the floor by squeezing your abs.

    Ab Roller

    • The ab roller is a device that practically gives you a total-body workout by working all your ab muscles, hips, back, shoulders and arms. The ab roller is like a wheel with two handles, which you grasp with either hand while kneeling on the floor. With just your knees and toes on the floor and the ab roller in your grasp in front of you, roll out the wheel as far forward as you can, moving your lower body closer to the floor. Return, raising your hips back up. According to the San Diego study, using the ab roller is about as effective for your abs as doing traditional crunches.

    Considerations

    • Machine weights can help you achieve the right postures when doing ab exercises. They also allow you to easily increase the weight amount as you improve. However, an effective strength training program includes a variety of ab exercises, including both body weight exercises and exercises with machine weights. Variety ensures your entire ab muscle group gets challenged, since different exercises target and emphasize different parts of your ab muscles. It's also important to strength train all your other muscle groups when you strength train to prevent imbalances that could lead to injury.