Stomach exercises are either loved or hated. That is the general impression I get, especially from guys. Push-ups are not considered to be that boring or fantastic, more middle-of-the-road. Any type of exercise with the word "crunch," however, gets either a distasteful expression or a thumbs up, such is the polarisation on the issue.

Why would this be so?

It turns out after asking around, that one of the major drawbacks people have with stomach exercises is that when they do a lot of them, they get a sore neck. Getting a sore neck does not make the exercise that popular with them. There is also the point that stomach exercises can be more taxing but this does not appear to be the biggest issue.

Immediately, the thought is that they are doing the exercise incorrectly; this may be a valid reason. A more common one, is that they lose form or do not know how to maintain their form during repetitions. After all, the point of doing a set of stomach exercises is to push yourself and form can be hard to maintain.

In this article, I am going to recommend a tip for doing stomach exercises that I like to do. I will also talk about where I got the idea from, which is partially from yoga and partially from body mechanics.

This tip alone will help you maintain your form when doing the classic stomach crunch and the idea can be adapted to other forms of crunch. If you follow this tip you will not have to worry about getting a sore neck from doing a lot of stomach exercise.

First of all, I will explain some of the theory behind the tip.

When most people do a classic stomach crunch, as in, when you have your feet flat on the floor, legs bent, knees raised, and you lift your chest off the ground, tighten your abdomen, until you can feel a "crunch" (note: this is not the same as a sit-up), your hands are on the back of your head.

Even with the best of intentions, though, your hands can start to press on the back of your head and hence you are levering your neck, curling it towards your chest as you raise from the floor. You still crunch, but you are now exerting a force on your neck that you should not be doing. 10 repetitions like this and you start to get a tight pain in your shoulders and lower neck. You may be all too familiar with this.

In yoga, something similar occurs when doing any sort of forward bend. When you grab your feet, either by the big toe or the soles, there is a tendency to round the back, bringing the shoulders up to your ears. You may do this yourself, if you do yoga, purely to stretch your legs and keep them straight as you can, in a bid to "do the pose".

The correct mentality is to not worry about getting the pose exactly optimised; you should only stretch as far as you can, and then a tiny bit more, yet maintain good overall body positioning. Good overall body positioning in yoga bends is sometimes captured in a phrase "letting your collar bones smile".

To let your collar bones smile, you try and let your lower chest touch your thighs when bending forward (even if it means bending a leg or not reaching with the hands so far). At the same time, you open out your chest, moving your shoulders back, as if you are opening your mouth in a large smile. You may see that it is hard to put your lower chest on your thighs and open your shoulders and curl your back at the same time.

The idea forces you to maintain a more natural spine when bending.

The same principle applies for stomach crunches, though rather than opening your chest you start with not putting pressure on your neck by inadvertently pushing on it.

How do you not inadvertently push your head forward? After all you have your hands on the back of your head?

The answer to this is that you change where you look when you do the crunch. Instead of looking at your knees or even your abdomen, as a lot of people do, you pick a point high on the wall to look at. At the same time, you push your chest to this same point.

The effect is that you barely touch the back of your head with your hands and you keep your upper back straight all the way up and all the way back down.

The reason for this is that when you look up, you are lifting your head and keeping it parallel with your chest. This automatically stops you curling forward, moving your head off the axis of movement and straining your neck.

You have to almost lift up and lower down watching your knees in your peripheral vision.

Here, then, are the steps to follow when doing a stomach crunch to avoid getting a sore neck:

• If indoors, pick a point close to the ceiling that you can see when you sit up. If outdoors, pick a point high on building. Both points should be at least 60 degrees from the horizontal.

• Before starting the stomach crunch, focus on the point and put your hands behind your head

• Lift up into the crunch and perceptibly push out your upper chest to your focus point

• Keep looking at the point as you lower yourself down

You will find that you can do a lot more crunches without straining your neck, if ever. In addition you will notice that your stomach exercises are more focused and you will be able to keep your form more. You will also be giving yourself more of the fitness benefits and at the same time, dispelling any negative ideas you may be building up about the exercise.

Mentality is an important driver in motivating you to do any kind of exercise. If you do not like a certain type of exercise, the chances are it is because you have built up a negative image of it in your mind through not learning, to do it properly or forcing yourself to learn it properly. It builds up a bad vibe.

Hopefully this tip will act like a short-cut to dispel that bad vibe and help you do better stomach crunches from now on.