We’re all pretty time-poor these days, so saving a trip to the gym to roll out your mat at home is a great solution, but it’s not always easy to find ab workouts you can depend on if you want to build a strong core with minimal equipment.
Before you turn to the pretty boring bank of sit-ups, crunches, or Russian twists, I strongly recommend giving my three-move core workout a try instead. You only need a dumbbell (the best adjustable dumbbells will give you more wiggle room) and roughly 15 minutes. It fits nicely onto the end of any leg or upper-body workout as a neat finisher to round off your hard work, plus it torches your abs and deep core.
Watch how to do this dumbbell abs workout step-by-step.
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Watch: 3-move dumbbell workout for home
Complete two reps of each combination movement (there are three combos), then increase to four on the next round and so on. For beginners, aim to reach 10 reps per combo, then go back down the ladder again. For experienced exercisers, aim for 20.
Your core muscles help stabilize your trunk and pelvis, which means your body becomes better able to deal with balance, coordination, movement and injury. Always engage your core by drawing your navel up and in toward your spine while bracing down and directing your breath down and out. This encourages belly breathing, which engages the diaphragm, rather than reducing your breath to your chest, which is limiting.
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Your core muscles help stabilize your trunk and pelvis, which means your body becomes better able to deal with balance, coordination, movement and injury.
During this workout, you’ll focus on engaging and strengthening multiple core muscles, including your abs, obliques and other deeper stabilizing muscles like the transverse abdominis, as you hold, crunch and rotate your way through.
Your abs are commonly referred to as the six-pack muscles, which run along the front of your stomach and give people muscle definition. Typically they’re targeted during exercises like sit-ups, but we don’t want to limit the body to only targeting these muscles.
That’s why we add twisting or lateral movement to focus on the lesser-known obliques — a group of superficial (external) and deeper (internal) muscles along the waist that aid rotation and lateral movement, plus the deeper stabilizing muscles responsible for protecting your spine and pelvis.
Why does this workout work?
If you constantly bang out 100s of sit-ups and crunches, you’re really only strengthening a particular group of muscles, which means creating potential imbalances or weaknesses elsewhere.
I like to program workouts to work in all planes of motion, which means I have clients sitting, kneeling, standing, lying, rotating, crawling, holding, moving, not moving and everything in between.
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That’s how you target as many different muscle groups as possible to build true strength, endurance, posture and stability.
That said, growing muscle comes from stimulus and consistency, so remember to increase the intensity or volume of training as your body adapts. Either repeat this workout several times per week or mix the exercises into any existing routine that you follow.
Growing muscle comes from stimulus and consistency.
Lastly, remember that control and range of motion are everything; try not to rush reps, even when it feels super spicy and challenging. Come back to your breath and focus on the quality of your reps over quantity. That might mean you even reduce your working sets or increase rest breaks at first, which is better than losing form and hurting yourself. Listen to your body, and stop if necessary.
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