Steps
- To begin, lie down on the floor or an exercise mat with your back pressed against the floor. Your arms should be lying across your sides with the palms facing down.
- Your legs should be crossed by wrapping one ankle around the other. Slowly elevate your legs up in the air until your thighs are perpendicular to the floor with a slight bend at the knees. Note: Your knees and toes should be parallel to the floor as opposed to the thighs.
- Move your arms from the floor and cross them so they are resting on your chest. This is the starting position.
- While keeping your lower back pressed against the floor, slowly lift your torso. Remember to exhale while perform this part of the exercise.
- Slowly begin to lower your torso back down to the starting position while inhaling.
- Repeat for the recommended amount of repetitions.
Tracking it in OneRep
Add the tuck crunch to a routine and your previous weight and reps sit beside every set, so the decision to add load is made by what is already on the screen rather than by memory. Exercise history and volume trends are one tap away, and logging works offline for the gyms where signal does not reach.
Because OneRep tracks food on the same timeline, a stall on this lift can be read against what you were actually eating that month — which is the difference between a programming problem and an eating one. More on that in tracking progressive overload without a spreadsheet.
Where the instructions come from
The steps above come from free-exercise-db, a public-domain exercise dataset. They are general guidance, not coaching for your body: if a movement hurts, stop and get someone qualified to look at it.