Absolutely. Please do not do them. Not with a machine. Not by themselves. Not at all. It is a terrible range of motion to subject yourself to and the resulting motion has very little to do with abdominal activation and stability. If you want your guts to be nasty it's mostly heavy compounds (squats/deads) and a bulletproof diet that will get you there.
At my gym there is this "adult male" who looks like a 12 year old with bitch tits and three rolls on his abdomen when he sits down in an upright position. All I ever see him do are DB presses and weighted ab crunches when he is in the weight room. I can see in his mind what he wants, but the way he goes about it is just beyond laughable.
My points of intersection with him are as follows - when I am in the steam room for 10 minutes at the end of my workout, he jumps in there and is just beginning his routine. I asked him once as a joke and he "explained it to me" that "this is the best warmup you can get" (even though it is not based on your heart rate and he is not actually stretching or doing much of anything). Then he changes his clothes without taking a shower, making sure to do two things - leave his completely soaking wet underwear on, because god forbid he is naked around other people - and two - literally hose himself down with Axe body spray because you know, gotta scoop all the bitches when you're crushing out those circuits! So clearly, a genius at work here.
After that, he cracks open an M-150 and slams 27G of sugar to the face so he has the "energy" to complete his "workout" and then throws this empty can in the locker next to his. The only reason I discovered the latter FACT was because one day I was opening up a spare locker to hang my wet towel in - and BOOM - like a fucking cartoon - literally dozens of these goddamn golden cans came flooding out of the locker like a waterfall, right as the janitor walked by. We both looked at each other, sighed, and rolled our eyes over this insanity. He brought in a trash bag and threw them all away, but not after I read the nutritional information just to confirm that indeed, this kid is the king of clown shoes training. Also he is too lazy to walk 10 feet away and throw it in the trash. Or at least he was. I think he got embarrassed and stopped doing it after he realized someone, anyone, cleaned up his "stash" lol.
ALSO, while I am on the subject of embarrassing shit nobody should ever do in their goddamn lives and how to SHAME them out of it, this one is astounding.
There are shitty oscillating fans mounted to the walls of the locker room up near the ceiling. They help move air around so it's not so stifling, even though it doesn't really matter because the environmental controls of the building are so shitty as to be worthless outside of hemorrhaging electrical expenditure into the atmosphere.
Half a dozen times now I have gotten out of the weight room and gone to my locker only to discover that some absolute imbecile has literally HUNG his WET BOXERS on the backside of the oscillating fan. To dry them out. As if it is a swimsuit spinning machine, which you are not supposed to put your normal clothes in anyways. ???
A half a dozen times in two years was not really like ruining my life or anything, but I saw it against last week and I said ENOUGH is ENOUGH. I grabbed a paper towel and threw those goddamn boxers off the fan and onto the top of the lockers and though to myself "Ok, this will send the message that SOMEONE didn't appreciate it. But that's not enough to keep this from happening again. You need to CONFRONT this dude".
So after I got out of the sauna and the shower I was walking back to my locker and caught this fucking grown-ass grey-haired man RED-HANDED. He was putting on those exact boxers so I leaned over and said "Hey man, I wasn't trying to cramp your style by moving your boxers off the fan, I just didn't want your ball-sweat blowing in my face anymore"
His face got so red, he couldn't even look me in the eyes, he just kind of stammered out "uhh, that's uhh... that's OK" and finished getting dressed before walking off as fast as fucking possible.
The sad thing is this dude probably raised six other children from conception to the point of maturity before he ever thought once about bringing a clean pair of boxers to the gym to change into. Goddamn. Fuck you too brah.
/gym rant over
