How To Get Ripped Obliques: 3 BEST Oblique Exercises You Should Be Doing

One of the biggest mistakes people make with their core training is overlooking the obliques and failing to realize their importance towards contributing to a well developed midsection. Because based on the orientation of the obliques and the way their fibers run, when they're well developed and you're at a low enough body fat percentage, they can actually help visually taper and narrow your waistline while adding more cuts to your midsection. Meaning that it would be in your best interest to start training them. But. But in order to train and develop them most effectively, we need to first understand their function and anatomy. In terms of their anatomy. The obliques run down the sides of the abdominals and are actually composed of two muscles, the external obliques and the internal obliques, which are located directly under the external obliques. But for simplicity, since these two muscles have very similar functions, you can just think of the obliques as one single muscle. And its main functions include spinal flexion, as you do in a sit up lateral flexion, or in other words, just a side bend and rotation of your torso. But the obliques also actually have two more lesser known functions that most people overlook, with the first being that it assists in posterior pelvic tilt and tucking the ribs down and in as shown here. And they also assist in drawing in your abdomen by bringing the belly button in towards the spine. And research actually shows that by implementing these two additional functions of the obliques during your core exercises, you're able to achieve even greater activation. Therefore, by choosing exercises that both incorporate the several previously mentioned functions of the obliques and also work in line with the diagonal orientation that their fibers run, we can then train and develop the obliques in the most effective manner possible. And a perfect example of this to start out, the workout is high to low cable woodchoppers, which is a great option since it enables us to apply weighted resistance distance directly in line with the diagonal way that the oblique fibers run. And including at least one weighted movement like this into your obliques workout is something I'd highly recommend since as I mentioned in past videos, the abs and obliques are just like any other muscle and can and should be overloaded with weight over time to optimally shape and develop them. Now, to properly perform this exercise, we want to set up a cable to above shoulder height, grab the handles with an interlocked grip and take a sideways step away from the cable. Draw in your abdomen to pre activate your obliques by exhaling and thinking about moving your belly button in towards your spine. Then what you want to do is keep your Arms extended and your elbows locked in place as you use the one side of your obliques to rotate your torso down and across your body towards the opposite knee. And the key here is to really focus on the rotational aspect of the movement while minimizing the use of your arm muscle by keeping your elbow position locked rather than bending and extending them or swinging the weight down with your arms. When done properly, you should feel a strong contraction in the corresponding side of the obliques that you're pulling towards. For this exercise, you'll want to implement a lower rep range of roughly 1015 reps and continue to add more weight as this rep range becomes easier and easier over time. Next, we'll follow this up with the bicycle crunch in order to further work the obliques as well as the abdominals with just the use of our body weight. Although research data on the obliques is lacking, this exercise does successfully incorporate the many movement patterns of the obliques and has actually been shown in some EMG analyses to elicit quite high obliques activation compared to other exercises. But in order to maximize the effectiveness of this exercise for the obliques, we need to ensure that we're implementing all of the obliques functions as we perform it. We can do so by doing two things before before we start our reps. First, you want to move into posterior pelvic tilt such that your lower back flattens against the ground and your ribs get tucked down. Then draw in your abdomen by exhaling and bringing your belly button in towards your spine. At this point, you may already feel a strong contraction in your obliques. And then from here we can now transition to doing the bicycle crunch while maintaining that posterior pelvic tilt and keeping the abdominals drawn in. Incorporating this is going to make a huge difference in your ability to activate the obliques during this movement. And in terms of exercise form, just don't do what most people do and just try to touch your elbow to your knee each rep, which just ends up in form compensations. Instead, remember what the obliques function to do and put your focus on simply crunching to the one side while rotating your torso. Ignore where your elbows and knees end up and instead just go as far as you're capable of to each side while still actually feeling obliques working during each rep. And for this exercise, you ideally want to use a much higher rep range of over 15 reps per side, for example. But the key is to focus more on the contraction and end your set based on the fatigue of your obliques and abs. Instead of aiming to accomplish A certain amount of reps. Next, we're going to move on to twisting leg raises. Now, the traditional leg raise itself with no twist has actually been shown in a few EMG analyses to already provide superior obliques activation when compared to other common core exercises, and is therefore a great choice to make the movement. Emphasize the obliques even more, though, we can simply incorporate a twist into each rep as you come up, since this will now incorporate lateral flexion and rotation of the torso into the movement in order to better activate the obliques. But again, just as we did with the last exercise, it's vital that you don't forget to incorporate the two additional functions of the obliques by moving into a posterior pelvic tilt and drawing in the abdomen before you start your reps. And although this exercise is quite difficult for most people to do hanging, there's plenty of ways to progress it. What I'd suggest is first perform these as lying leg raises with the twist on the floor, as this is going to be the easiest variation. And then you want to progress them to doing on the captain's chair shown here, and then progress to doing them hanging with bent knees and then eventually hanging with your legs straighter out. This way you're just ensuring that you're increasing the demand placed on your obliques as they continue to develop and strengthen over time. And due to the difficulty of this exercise, a rep range of anywhere between 10, 20 reps is ideal. But again, the focus needs to be on controlling and actively using your obliques every single rep. As for frequency and number of sets, recommendations for these movements, I'd recommend throwing three to four sets of each of these into your current ab training, which you should be doing roughly once to even four, four times a week, depending on how much volume you're doing during each session. So, for example, if I was doing three relatively shorter ab workouts per week, I would just throw in three sets of one of these obliques exercises into each of those ab workouts. In any case, though, try out these movements, figure out which ones work best for you, and then implement them accordingly. Using the guidelines that I went through as doing so is going to make a significant improvement in your obliques development.

Now, just keep in mind, guys, that choosing the right core exercises is just one part of the equation. But dialing in your nutrition by eating the right amounts and types of foods is really what's going to be the key to leaning down and defining your midsection. And for a step by step program that shows you exactly how to train and how to set up your nutrition to transform your body with science just like Shirill did over here in only nine months. Then simply head on over to built with science.com and and take the starting point quiz to discover what science based program is best for you. Anyways, hope you all enjoyed this one. Don't forget to show your support by giving the View a like leaving a comment down below as to what you'd like to see me cover next, subscribing to the channel and turning on notifications for the channel as well as this all really does help me out and I'd appreciate it. Thank you so much everyone and I'll see you next time.