Seated Ab Crunch with Cable

🎯 Abdominals🏋️ CableIsolation

How to do the seated ab crunch with cable

  1. Attach a rope to a high cable pulley.
  2. Place a bench in front of cable weight stack.
  3. Grasp the rope over your shoulders and sit with your back towards the stack.
  4. With your feet firmly on the floor and keeping your hips steady, flex at the waist bringing your elbows towards your knees.
  5. Return to the starting position.
  6. Note: Perform this exercise in a slow controlled manner.

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

Everything happens at one joint. That gives you direct control over where the tension sits; the trade-off is that the muscle gets no help, so the load that feels hard here is a fraction of what a multi-joint version of the pattern would take. Slow, complete repetitions beat heavy ones.

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:

Related exercises

Illustration: Everkinetic — CC BY-SA 4.0 — license. Modified versions are shared under the same license. Full attribution →

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