Normally the approach of the so-called “abdominal training” is wrong. In the case of the obliques, this is no exception and when we think of these muscles, exercises such as crunches with lateral flexion, lateral flexions of the dumbbell spine or Russian twists immediately come to mind.
Once again, it is necessary to emphasize that we must change the approach we have of all the muscles that make up our middle area and begin to understand it as a whole that acts in synergy to keep our spine stable against external disturbances, that is, the core.
So, in this article, we show you five exercises that will test your core and make your obliques work to prevent the spine from rotating or flexing laterally.
Kettlebell swing rotary
The kettlebell swing with rotation combines two anti-movement patterns: anti-rotation and anti-lateral flexion. This means that our obliques must work both in the frontal plane to counteract lateral and transverse flexion to counteract rotation. This is very useful especially in the context of people who only train their core in the sagittal plane: plates, ab wheel, dead bug …
Press Pallof
The Pallof press is probably the best known anti-rotation exercise but if we want to progress in it we must be creative and include different variants that put our core in check.
We can see some of these variants but we can do many more, including strides in the movement, do it with knees resting on the floor or even place a disc or object in the middle of the rubber so that it causes a moment of lateral flexion in our column.
Side iron with paddle
The side plate is a variant in itself of the traditional plate. Just as the latter works in the sagittal plane, the first one works in the frontal plane.
If we add a unilateral paddle with a pulley to this movement, we achieve the combination of anti-rotation and lateral anti-flexion patterns, as was the case in the first exercise.
Farmer walk on stairs
The farmer’s walk or farmer’s walk is a basic exercise of lateral anti-flexion, especially if we do it by holding a single dumbbell, disc or kettlebell.
In addition, if we add some stairs in our route the anti-movement pattern is accentuated. If we do not have some stairs within our reach we can go up and down one step.
Dead bug with anti-rotation
The dead bug is an anti-extension exercise that comes from Pilates. For our obliques, we are interested in one of its variants in which we hold the end of rubber or pulley that is to our right or left.
In this way we could talk about a combination between press Pallof and the dead bug where the best of the first and second are combined, that is, an anti-extension pattern with an anti-rotation pattern.