Rope Crunch

🎯 Abdominals🏋️ CableBeginnerIsolation

How to do the rope crunch

  1. Kneel 1-2 feet in front of a cable system with a rope attached.
  2. After selecting an appropriate weight, grasp the rope with both hands reaching overhead. Your torso should be upright in the starting position.
  3. To begin, flex at the spine, attempting to bring your rib cage to your legs as you pull the cable down.
  4. Pause at the bottom of the motion, and then slowly return to the starting position.
  5. These can be done with twists or to the side to hit the obliques.

Muscles worked

The prime movers are the rectus abdominis and the obliques, which flex the trunk forward and resist it being pulled into extension or twisted out of line.

Every exercise for:Abdominals

How this movement works

One joint changes angle and the resistance travels toward you along a single arc. Nothing is positioned to help, so tension stays where you aimed it and the usable load drops sharply against a multi-joint pull for the same muscle. Protect the range of motion; buying weight by shortening the arc defeats the point.

It is filed under strength: produce force against resistance for a countable number of repetitions, and progress the resistance over time.

What you need

A cable holds tension for the whole range, including the point where a free weight would go slack. Moving the pulley changes the angle the resistance arrives from without changing the movement.

Every exercise using:Cable

These train the abdominals too, using equipment this one does not:

Difficulty

Listed at beginner level: the pattern is simple enough to pick up without coaching, and a position that goes wrong mid-set is obvious enough to correct on the next repetition.

Of the 97 abdominals exercises in this database, 69 are listed at beginner level.

Related exercises

Photos: free-exercise-db — public domain (Unlicense) Full attribution →

ⓘ Informational only — not a substitute for professional fitness or medical advice.