Oblique curls should be included in any abdominal exercises to work the side muscles of your stomach. Learn how to do oblique curls to strengthen ab muscles with tips from a fitness trainer in this free core exercise video.
Carol Childers has been a physical fitness trainer for 23 years.
Part of working the abdominal muscles is working the obliques, that's your internal and external lateral flexors in the waistline. They serve as the girdle to the spine, so you don't want to leave them out. We're going to round down and we're first going to start by placing one hand behind the head. Now if you have a tendency to pull your neck out of nice cervical alignment, you can always just rest a hand to the side of the ear and that's going to cause you to line that head up with the spine. So whichever works best for you so you can maintain that nice cervical posture. What we're going to do is think of taking this shoulder over on the diagonal, but we're really crunching internal to external on the opposite side, and pushing external out, and release. So we take a big inhale before we start the movement. Try to keep your gaze or your focus either down at your abdominal wall or right through the middle of your knees. Try not to look up too much. And crunch and release. Now although I look like I'm lifting over here, I'm actually working on the opposite side, but the goal is not to think of this. So this is traditionally what you may have seen, but obliques run down to the same side where they insert down into the same leg, so I'm really not doing anything but rotating my spine there, I'm not really turning that muscle fully on like I can if I'm just thinking of crunching. Sometimes it even helps to take the opposite hand and reach your fingers towards your foot so it really puts in that lateral flexion. But if you don't have the range of motion to do that, stay here, just let your hand rest by your side and exhale when you contract, inhale just halfway back down. Try not to fall all the way back because you want to maintain a lift, neutral cervical spine and shoulder blades slightly off the floor, back into the mat and exhale and inhale. Work about 10 reps to each side starting out, and advance from there to fatigue.
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