Steps
- Start out by lying on your right side with your legs lying on top of each other. Make sure your knees are bent a little bit.
- Place your left hand behind your head.
- Once you are in this set position, begin by moving your left elbow up as you would perform a normal crunch except this time the main emphasis is on your obliques.
- Crunch as high as you can, hold the contraction for a second and then slowly drop back down into the starting position.
- Remember to breathe in during the eccentric (lowering) part of the exercise and to breathe out during the concentric (elevation) part of the exercise.
Tracking it in OneRep
Add the oblique crunches - on the floor 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.