The 16 Best Oblique Exercises to Fire Up the Sides of Your Abs

For one, they’re an adjunct respiratory muscle: They pull your chest downward as you exhale, explains Hodges. They enable you bend and rotate your torso when twisting to shut a door or bending right down to lift something off the bottom, Savage says. And in addition they enable you resist bending and rotating your torso in other situations, like once you’re holding a suitcase and your body desires to naturally tip to at least one side, Hodges says.

An enormous job of the obliques is to stabilize your spine, rib cage, and pelvis, Hodges adds. They usually achieve this while we’re standing, walking, running, bending or rotating, he explains. The spinal stability is super necessary since it helps promote good posture and protects your lower back from excessive strain or injury, Savage explains.

How will you work your obliques?

You’ll be able to engage your obliques with any movement that involves internally or externally rotating across the centerline of your body, Savage explains—for instance, in exercises just like the Russian twist, single-leg jackknife, and row your boat. You can too goal them with movements that have you ever dynamically bending to the side, like with side bends, the windmill, or the alternating side crunch. Your range of motion here plays an enormous part in only how much you might be engaging your obliques in these movement patterns, Savage says.

Finally, moves that involve resisting rotation (anti-rotation exercises, like a renegade row and bird-dog) and side-bending (anti-lateral flexion exercises, like a suitcase carry and side plank) also fan the flames of the muscles along the edges of your abdomen, Hodges says.

What’s the most effective method to train your obliques?

You don’t need dedicated obliques workouts to effectively smoke this muscle group. Hodges suggests picking two to a few exercises that specifically goal your side abs and incorporating them into your usual routines.

There are a bunch of the way to achieve this: Some body weight obliques exercises, especially the anti-movement ones, work great in a warm-up to fireside up your muscles for the work ahead. Others fit nicely into your fundamental set—try performing oblique moves as a superset, moving from one to the following without rest, Hodges says. You’ll be able to stack two specific abs exercises or you’ll be able to do an obliques exercise together with one which targets a distinct area (say, like a lateral lunge, or a dumbbell squat).