Steps
- Lie flat on the floor with your lower back pressed to the ground. For this exercise, you will need to put one hand beside your head and the other to the side against the floor.
- Make sure your feet are elevated and resting on a flat surface.
- Now lift the shoulder in which your hand is touching your head.
- Simply elevate your shoulder and body upward until you touch your knee. For example, if you have your right hand besides your head, then you want to elevate your body upwards until your right elbow touches your left knee. The same variation can be applied doing the inverse and using your left elbow to touch your right knee.
- After your knee touches your elbow, lower your body until you have reached the starting position.
- Remember to breathe in during the eccentric (lowering) part of the exercise and to breathe out during the concentric (upward) part of the exercise.
- Continue alternating in this manner until all of the recommended repetitions for each side have been completed.
Tracking it in OneRep
Add the oblique crunches to a routine and your previous weight and reps sit beside every set, so the decision to add load is made by what is already on the screen rather than by memory. Exercise history and volume trends are one tap away, and logging works offline for the gyms where signal does not reach.
Because OneRep tracks food on the same timeline, a stall on this lift can be read against what you were actually eating that month — which is the difference between a programming problem and an eating one. More on that in tracking progressive overload without a spreadsheet.
Where the instructions come from
The steps above come from free-exercise-db, a public-domain exercise dataset. They are general guidance, not coaching for your body: if a movement hurts, stop and get someone qualified to look at it.