Avoid bending forwards

Bending forward to do toe touches is no good for exercising the abdominals and causes stress in the joints of your lower back. Any exercise is potentially dangerous if you bend forward without supporting your back. Adding in twists after you have bent forward is guaranteed to wear away the soft tissue and bone in your lower back, leading to serious back pain. Exercises to avoid are bent-over arm windmills, side lunges with twists or twisting after you have come up in a situp. These movements will fatigue your back muscles.

Avoid straight leg situps

You may damage your spine if you hook your feet under a support, keep your legs straight, and then jerk your body upwards in a straight back situp. Research clearly shows that the lowest rungs, feet unsupported, are the best for safe and effective abdominal exercise. Don't lie on your back and do straight leg raises, or hold your legs on the floor or hold the legs in the air and wave them backwards and forwards. Good quality abdominal exercises have the feet unsupported, knees bent, hands relaxed with a slow and gradual curl.

Avoid continuous arm raises

Don't do a whole series of exercises where the arms are kept at or above shoulder height. Once the muscle supporting the shoulders gets fatigued or starts to burn, you will start to damage your shoulder joint. Another problem might be a stiff neck the next day, as the muscles you have used pull on the neck.

Avoid dips on the floor

Avoid doing dips on the floor (sometimes called reverse pushups). Dips done this way are meant to exercise the muscles on the back of your arms (the triceps), but most of the stress is inside the shoulder joint. If you aren't careful, you can cause major injury to a small joint inside the shoulder. This injury shows up as a deep pain inside the shoulder joint, or the inability to lift up your arm. Ordinary pushups will work the triceps muscles without the danger of doing dips on the floor.

Avoid star jumps

Any continuous jumping movement will cause lower leg injury, such as shin splints, pain in the soles of your foot or problems with the Achilles tendon. The impact of hitting the ground so many times can also cause injury to your spine. Star jumps combine the lower leg problems of continuous jumping with the shoulder problems of continuous arm raises.

Original materials supplied by Monty Dortkamp, Chief Executive Officer of Fitness Australia and Managing Director of the Australian Institute of Recreation. Edited by everybody, March 2005.