I see so many people doing Bicycle Crunches and Russian Twists for their obliques, but guess what? They're not doing anything for you...
I see so many people doing Bicycle Crunches and Russian Twists for their obliques, but guess what? They're not doing anything for your obliques.
So, if you hate love handles as much as I do, then today this article is going to be exactly what you're looking for because I'm going to show you what to do finally to get rid of them once and for all. Now, let's face it, love handles are stubborn. Only second to the low back fat it's the area on your body that you just can't seem to get rid of no matter what you do unless you're doing the right things. So that being said, guys, I want to show you five things that you can either stop doing because they're not helping you or start doing because they will right now. So, let's start right off the bat where we need to. And that is any time you want to lose fat anywhere on your body, not just on your love handles, you got to start the discussion with what you're putting in your mouth.
Your nutrition matters. And notice I didn't say diet because I'm not a fan of diets, diets or something temporary that you're on for some time, that you're eventually going to be off. Nutrition is how you feed your body over the long haul. But even if you are on a diet plan, "following" the diet is not enough. Because if you think that just by following the rules of the diet plan, let's say Keto or you're following a vegetarian diet. Or let's say the different ways of eating and strategies like intermittent fasting, you might be abiding by that time frame within which you're eating. However, if you're eating too many calories more than your body is burning off, you are not going to burn fat. So, following the diet rules might mislead you into thinking that you're doing something right. It's got to be more than that. In every instance you've got to be hypocaloric, you're got to be burning more calories than you're taking in if you want to get rid of that fat.
Point number two also relates to nutrition, but it ties into that deposition of fat and that preferential deposition of fat that doesn't necessarily work in our favor. You see, we might want to get rid of that fat over the lower abdomen and the love handles and maybe over that low back, which I happen to still have here myself, even at very lean levels of body fat. But remember, we don't get to choose because the body stores fat in a very particular way, particularly in men. You start losing it first here in your face and your neck. And the last place to come off is down the abdomen and around the love handles and the waist. So, what we do is we got to persist with that nutrition plan, even if you're doing everything right.
Now if you notice, the body fat loss occurred easily in the face and the neck. You have to persist and go through the pattern of body fat loss. But the point is, you just can't give up too early, persist on this path and I promise you, it's just that it will go away just a little bit more slowly.
Reason number three of why you still can't get rid of those love handles is because you're training just your abs. I understand that when we develop a muscle, the appearance of it is going to look better. However, if it's covered in fat, you're not going to see the results of your hard work. Well, if you're doing the first two things I told you, you're going to start to see what's underneath and that's where the rubber hits the road. Are you showing off any muscle because you've taken the time to develop the right ones? And anybody that's told you to avoid training the obliques, has given you wrong information.
The obliques, when trained, are going to give you the appearance that you're looking for. The idea here, though, is to not do just ab exercises because there's a big difference. Ab exercises are like this, traditional crunches, the sagittal plane moves, sit-ups, anything that sort of just trains you in that straightforward and back, as I said, sagittal plane. But the obliques are designed for rotation, so you want to make sure that you're performing rotational exercises from the bottom up where you're rotating your legs in space, and from the top down, we were rotating your upper body in space. Weight these exercises too when you can. Utilize a hanging bar so that you're using the weight of your legs to create an overload. Once the obliques are developed like any other muscle, they're going to look better and show better, especially once that body fat level comes down.
Whenever four is probably the biggest mistake people make when they're trying to get obliques, because, again, you think you're doing the right things, but you're not doing it correctly. And that is you might have said at the last point, I do so much rotational work, there's no way I'm not training my obliques effectively. Well, maybe not. Because you do an exercise like this, the Bicycle Crunch, or if you do an exercise like this, the Russian Twist, guess what? These aren't training your obliques. Why? Because you're not rotating. See, it looks like you're rotating because you're tapping your hands left and right or because you're having your elbows touch opposite knees. But if you're just flipping your elbows or flapping your hands, you're not rotating. To train the obliques properly, you have to make sure that you're creating rotation. So, what I like to do is give this tip: If you're going to do that Bicycle Crunch, you set your elbows up in that position slightly in front of your body. Once they're set, you don't move them. What you do is you move your torso, so you twist to get your elbow to meet your knee, and then you twist your whole body to get your other elbow to the opposite knee. You don't just flip the elbows across the body giving the impression that you're turning because you're not working your obliques maximally. The same thing when we talk about the Russian Twist, don't just touch down to the sides, moving your hands across your body. Keep your hands in a fixed place right in front of your torso and rotate your entire upper body down to the side so that you're getting true rotation.
It seems like a small point here, guys, but it holds all the difference in whether or not these exercises give you the benefits that you thought you were getting when you were doing them in the first place.
And step number five relates to an exercise you probably long ago stop doing or maybe you never did it in your life and you maybe should consider doing it again. It's called the Stick Twist or the Broomstick Twist. And what I like about this is it reinforces everything we just talked about in the last point, and that is it fixes your body in space and then allows you to rotate from there without getting that flipping of the elbows across your body. So, you sit back on a bench with anything behind your back here, a broomstick, like I said, any type of dowel. If you want to go even more challenging, you can put a barbell back there to create that opportunity for a weighted exercise. But what we do is we lock our elbows in place, sit back to get that posterior tilt, and a little bit of resistance against the abdominal obliques into flexion. And then we go and we just drive our elbow across our body with the rotation of the torso. The torso and the bar are moving as one and we drive across. Here's where the deal is, though, guys, you try to get an intense contraction of the obliques on every single repetition. Stop counting. It doesn't matter. Instead of counting reps, make those reps count. Rotate to the left and drive that tight contraction of the right oblique. Rotate to the right and drive that tight contraction of the left oblique. Every single repetition here should be focused on the quality, not the quantity. And when you do this, guys, if you've never done this exercise before, the results that will await you in terms of deepening those obliques will be mind-blowing.
So, guys, I get it. There's nothing to love about love handles, but there's a path to getting rid of them. If you're persistent and with these steps, guys, I promise you the results will be there if you put in the work.
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