Best "Obliques" Exercise You Thought Was Too Easy!

Today I want to share with you ONE exercise to help you get tighter and deeper cuts throughout your obliques. As you probably already know, when I do my ab training and when I create my programs, I like to incorporate movements where you do heavy weight for low reps, or light weight for high reps. Your abs are one of those muscle groups that are going to respond to both.

Traditionally when I do my oblique training, you’ll see me do a lot of woodchoppers and a lot of standing dumbbell oblique crunches as well. But, I’ve been looking for something new to do, and I wanted to put a twist on an old-school exercise.

Floor Oblique Crunch 2.0

What I started doing recently is a floor oblique crunch, however, I was able to intensify the exercise by bringing my legs into the movement. And I don’t mean intensify it by simply making it harder to do, but also by actually feeling a lot more engagement down the entire side of your body.

Traditionally when you do a floor oblique crunch, you bring one leg over the other, lay on your side, and crunch to the ceiling so that only your upper body is coming up off the ground. This is still an effective exercise, but can become “too easy” very quickly.

If you want to make the exercise even more intense, what you’re going to do is bring your feet together, and lift your toes off the ground by about an inch. Then, on every single repetition, you’re going to come up, and you’re going to bring your knees in AND crunch at the same time. When you go back to the starting position, your feet are never going to touch the ground. Keeping your feet 1 inch off the ground creates a tremendous amount of tension in your core! You’re going to continue to do this for 15 – 20 repetitions PER SIDE, and a total of 5 – 6 sets of this exercise.

What makes this exercise and this variation so great is that you can do this even if your core isn’t as strong as mine, but you still want to really go for it and aim for 20 repetitions. Let’s say you can only do this new variation for 8 repetitions. As soon as you finish those 8, put your feet on the ground, and then finish your other 12 the regular way. Then every single time you start your set, do as many as you can with your feet off the ground and knees coming up, before putting your feet down when you get tired, and finishing your set the traditional way. Always pushing yourself to do the advanced version at the start of every set is still PROGRESSION!

Conclusion

When you’re training ANY muscle group, you don’t have to find new exercises to do. A lot of times you can take a traditional movement and add a twist or a spin to it to make it a bit more intense, but so that it still makes sense with your training.