Bicycle Crunch Neck Pain

A modified sit up can help address your neck pain while a few alternative exercises can get you the results you want in your core without risking your spine.

Bicycle crunch neck pain. The myotatic crunch. In a recent interview with safebee erik moen discussed neck pain and soreness resulting from poor bike positioning. A personal trainer s guide to doing crunches without neck pain raise your hand if the last time you were taught to do a proper crunch was during your elementary school gym class. For starters we were created to have our feet on.

Bicycle crunches are an effective abdominal exercise especially for targeting the inner and outer obliques which run alongside your torso. These five exercises can help you avoid neck pain from cycling cycling active february 26 2018 5 00 pm humans weren t designed to ride bikes. How to avoid neck pain when doing. Your abs exercise routine shouldn t consist of crunches alone but they can be beneficial to include in your workout if you perform them correctly.

Solving on the bike neck pain with best practices and extreme measures. The proper crunch keeps your spine in a perfect arc all the way from the lower back to the head. Matt russ is a professional coach with over two decades of experience working with athletes up to the professional level. If you are used to cycling for 60 90 minutes and find you have a lot of neck and shoulder pain at the 3 hour mark this may simply be because you ramped up your mileage way to quickly.

Since the hands are positioned behind your head it is easy to pull on your head and neck while rotating your body. If you twist from the neck while doing bicycle crunches you don t actually target the core the way you want to and you put unwanted pressure on the neck which can cause pain and tightness. It is an incredibly common issue with cyclists of all levels from the absolute beginner to commuters and even seasoned racers. Road cycling involves extended periods where the neck is hyperextended tilted backwards particularly when the bike is set up with a large handlebar drop when riding a time trial for example.

If you still feel neck pain after making adjustments to your technique or you want to mitigate the risk of hurting yourself altogether consider swapping crunches which target only the rectus abdominis muscle for other exercises that. It works dominantly on your hip flexors and abdominal muscles leading to a stronger core.