Anyone interested in fitness these days should be looking at workouts as a means to that end. There is nothing wrong with intelligent dieting, but if you ask anyone that made a huge jump from overly unfit to overly fit, the end result is usually that a combination of diet and exercise is what finally did the trick. Ab workouts in particular can be very impressive and that is why they are the focus of this discussion.
A relatively recent concept in the mass fitness market would have to be the concept of the core. This is only a few years old in mass market terms, although it has been known to science for a long time. Your core muscles, including your abs, are muscles that often function as stabilizing gyros for the rest of your body. Therefore, exercising your core and making it strong not only increases your overall health, but it also makes it easier to exercise the other muscle groups in your body. In a sense, this means that the best ab workouts can actually help make other fitness goals easier to achieve.
Although some workouts are better than others in terms of the gains that you experience, the simple truth of the matter is that there is no magic bullet when it comes to these types of exercises. It is simple hard work, dedication and consistency that will get you what you want in the end and that means that you should start off with something that you know for a fact you can do regularly.
Can you only do five abdominal crunches and five reverse crunches a day? Fine! That is better than nothing. Do those exercises until you feel strong enough to do more and then do more. It seems ridiculously simple, but once you approach the problem intelligently you’ll see that this is the proper way to think about things. Just like a great quarterback works with what the defence gives them, so too do you need to work with what your body gives you. Don’t use five crunches as an excuse to do no crunches. Do not let the great be the enemy of the good. Forward progress is always good in fitness terms.
If you only have a little bit of time during which you can accomplish things with ab workouts, it is often a good idea to think about synergizing your workouts so that they can do more for you. Exercising as many core muscles as possible with your exercises is a good example of synergy (i.e. an abdominal forward and reverse curl combination will cover more of your core than twice as many forward curls). Another good example of synergy is using something like the flex belt with proven electrical muscle stimulation results while working out (and while doing other things too) so that you get an added benefit for a relatively small investment. Synergy won’t get you the gains on its own, but it will make your gotten gains better.