The sit ups station is often deemed as the “easiest” IPPT station by many serviceman. And we do agree that if you do put in effort to train consistently, it is indeed the station that would allow you to gain the most points. The simplest way to train for sit ups is to do sit ups consistently. Yes you heard it right! However, do you know that there are a lot of other exercises that would train your abdominal muscle and allow it to gain tremendous amount of strength?

Let us first start off by talking about the abs. The abs muscle is the core muscle that provides stability for your whole body. It is a large group of muscles in the front of the abdomen that assists in the regular breathing movement and supports the muscles of the spine while lifting and keeping abdominal organs such as the intestines in place.

As mentioned earlier, sit ups is the most basic and simple form of exercise to train the abs muscles. However, there are a whole lot of other exercises that you can also do to train your abs. Read on to find out more.

1. Train Your Abs Muscle and all other Muscles

It is very important to adequately train all the muscles that is involved in the movement when doing sit ups. There are the primary, secondary and stabilizing muscles being used to complete one rep of sit ups. You can add exercises to train the secondary and stabilizing muscles every now and then and be ready to see improvements in the number of reps you will be able to complete. The primary muscles is none other than the abdominis. Exercises such as sit ups and crunches trains the abdominis. The secondary muscles would be the lower abs. The lower abs can be trained by exercises such as leg lifts. The stabilizing muscles would be the obliques. The obliques can be trained with exercises such as side planks.

2. Max Reps for Each Set

For the IPPT, a minute is given to servicemen to complete as many sit ups reps as they can. It is important to train yourself according to the “IPPT Test Conditions”. For that 1 minutes, you will be crunching out your max reps. It is therefore very important to ensure that you are able to do sit ups continuously for the first 45 seconds. To do this, during every training, you can train yourself to do every sets of sit ups to your max. Take a rest, continue with the next set and do it till failure. Continue this for the planned number of sets.

3. Abs Training Schedule

The abs is the core muscle for your body. It is a large muscle group and can be trained multiple times a week. You can do your abs exercises after a run, or after your weights training for other muscle groups. For a start, train your abs twice a week. Slowly increase the number of times you train your abs per week.

Our next article will be giving you tips on how you can train for your 2.4km run.