What s up guys, Jeff Cavaliere, Athleanx.com.
Today, we continue our Perfect Series, this time The Perfect Oblique Workout, or some
like to call it the love handles.
But there's no such thing as perfect love handles, they're just fat obliques.
So we have to do today though is attack them and I'm going to give you a step by step game
plan for doing just that like we have in all of our perfect workouts.
That being said, guys, we know that there is a body fat accumulation issue that happens
here, particularly in men, because we tend to store fat here pretty readily.
And I want to make sure I help you there, too.
If you're looking for some nutritional guidance, because that's going to be the only thing,
not a few AB exercises or oblique exercises, that's the only thing that will get the body
fat to disappear.
Head over to athleanx.com/carbs, I've laid out a little nutritional guide for you over
there where we breakdown each of the macronutrients, yes, carbohydrates should be part of your
overall game plan.
I'm going to show you the healthier ones to choose and guide you through a plate division
technique that I use that makes measuring and counting calories a hell of a lot easier.
Again, I don't want to leave you stranded.
You can head over there and get that free information.
Now, where we have to do here, we've got to do the work so that when you get rid of that
body fat, your beliefs are actually looking good.
To do that, let's start breaking down the workout step by step.
As I mentioned in the open, to train the obliques fully you have to make sure that you're tapping
into all of their capabilities, and they do more than just rotate.
As a matter of fact, they can control rotation driven from the top down or from the bottom
up.
Or they can flex you to one side or the other, but from the top down or the bottom up.
Or they can prevent lateral flexion altogether or prevent rotation altogether.
There's a lot of functions here, so we want to make sure that we hit all of them.
And in terms of their anatomy, they're actually equipped well to do this because of the direction
of their fibers.
If you make your gun just like this and you point it right back in your holster, you'll
see that the finger that points down towards your junk, that's aligned right with the external
obliques.
And they have a function that brings them down and across in this direction and functions
in that way.
We have the thumb that points up across this way perpendicular to that, that's the internal
obliques is how they work in concert here that makes it so unique and why we want to
make sure we tap into them with all those functions, with specific exercises to do just
that.
So the first thing we do in our workout here is attack the main rotational function of
the obliques, the one that you're probably most familiar with.
And the one I like to do first is the bottom up rotation, because we know once we start
using the weight of the legs, the exercises are more difficult so we stick them in the
beginning of the workout when we're most fresh.
And the one I like here is called the Archer Tuck.
And we're not just again pulling our knees in towards our chest we're actually sliding
our body from one cheek to the other to position ourselves with a better capability of creating
a nice, strong contraction when we bring those legs into our chest, maximizing that intense
contraction through rotation both right and left.
And from here, we're going to go and we're going to work the other way.
Now we're going to go top down rotation and here we re going to do a basic Russian Twist.
And what I like to do here is actually take the legs out of it.
I don't want to fatigue the hip flexors.
So in this particular workout, I'm going to keep my feet on the ground.
But now driving that rotation from the top down.
Right.
The hips stay stable now, but it's the top that's twisting on it.
And what I really like to do to reinforce the proper mechanics here is have you focus
on what you're doing with your elbows.
Turn this into a row.
Pretend like you're doing a Cable Row and drive your elbows far back behind you as you
can to reinforce that you're actually getting good rotation from the shoulders up on the
torso and you re not just tapping your hands back and forth.
We don't call these Russian Taps, they're called Russian Twists for a reason.
Each of these exercises gets done for 45 seconds apiece with a 15 second rest before you transition
to that second one.
Now, listen, if you can't do it for a full 45 seconds, that's fine.
The way this workout is structured is you go for as long as you can even rest/pause
if needed to get through the 45 seconds and then take that definitive 15 second rest before
moving on.
That brings us to the third exercise here in the workout.
In this time we're focusing on that lateral flexion and again from the bottom up and the
top down.
And from the bottom up where we focus our efforts is with the Side Plank Bridge Twist.
I actually covered this exercise a long time ago on the channel, but it's no less useful
now.
What you do is you create this sort of eccentric control as I drop down with a little bit of
rotation.
But when I come back up to the top, I drive up into that side plank lift, really trying
to drive my hip up, creating that lateral flexion we're talking about.
But again, the shoulders are staying stable in the hips are what are doing the work here
- bottom up.
I do this for 45 seconds on each side and then I move on to the next exercise here we
work from the top down and this one's called the Side Cycle Crunch.
And all I'm doing here now is leaving the hips in place and focusing on flexing my torso
from the top down.
Each time I bring my knee in, I flex my trunk laterally towards it, bringing my elbow down
towards that knee.
Really go for the good contraction here.
This is not about speed, it's about getting good quality contractions 45 seconds at a
time.
Once again, you approach both the right and the left side before we move on to the next
exercise.
And this is where we start to do the part that most people forget to do.
And it's the anti-stuff or the anti-lateral control and the anti-rotational control.
And we start with the anti-lateral movement here.
I love this one.
It's called the Side Plank Walk through.
I'm getting into a static Side Plank position.
And no, I don't like static anything, as you know, and planks in terms of what they provide
you, we can do so much better than that, and this gives us the chance to just do that.
We get on that Side Plank Hold, but we make it a little bit more dynamic below.
So we're walking our feet in this way.
And you can see when I get this other leg up and driving it up towards my chest, I'm
actually supporting the entire weight of the side plank through just one leg as opposed
to the foot contact of two.
That obviously makes it harder.
Your job is to stay as rigid as possible on the bottom side, not allowing your body to
collapse into that flexion.
Hence the anti-lateral flexion component of this.
We work each side once again for 45 seconds, resting if needed.
This can be a little bit difficult, but because it's an isometric exercise, you're better
equipped to handle it at this stage because you're stronger there than you are concentrically.
Which brings us to the final exercise here, the anti-rotational control and this is something
called The Wall Lock.
And what I do here is I plant my hand in contact with the wall and then my opposite hand on
top of that wrist locking myself in place.
And what this is doing is, it's now challenging you to maintain a rigid torso facing straight
ahead, because what it wants to do is give in and twist towards the wall.
To prevent rotation you're going to have to activate that oblique that's on the opposite
side of the wall and hold it strong.
Again, this is an isometric exercise, challenging but capable of being done at this spot even
when fatigued, because it's easier than the concentric exercise.
So we lock in and we maintain position there for 45 seconds on one side and of course we
flip around to the other side for 45 seconds.
If you put this all together guys, you're going 45 seconds at a time for 10 exercises.
Fifteen seconds rest in between for a total workout of 10 minutes.
For those of you looking to take it up a notch, you have access to a band.
The two exercise you can make a good band swap out.
We'll start in reverse order for the anti-rotational exercise, try this banded step out, we call
an Oak Tree Step out.
Get that band in position in the center of your chest and you simply step out, increase
the resistance to the band and its tendency to want to twist you in the opposite direction.
Don't twist it all, resist that and perform the repetitions again on both sides for 45
seconds.
And of course, that lateral flexion that we do from the top down, I love this Banded Elbow
Thrust.
You can really get a good intense contraction.
You take this for 45 seconds for each side to get the job done with the additional use
of that band.
And there you have it guys, the perfect oblique workout, which yes, will help you with those
love handles.
Because as you develop the muscle underneath and you go to athleanx.com/carbs to get your
free nutritional guidance I'm providing you with, you're going to have the perfect one
two combination to get rid of the fat that's covering them up right now and get them to
looking better.
And as always, guys are going to give you the screenshot here.
For the full step-by-step plan guys to make sure that nothing is overlooked when it comes
to a training.
Putting the science back in strength always guys.
If you're looking for a step-by-step plan, we have day-by-day nutritional plans available
for you as well, you can head over to athleanx.com.
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All right guys, see you soon.