Let's face it, for ab exercises and oblique exercises, you're mostly going to gravitate to bodyweight exercises, which is fine. But bodyweight exercises have their limitations.
You can't make fine adjustments to the resistance, which is going to be a problem for bodybuilding, because for bodybuilding you need to target specific rep ranges and fluctuate them. That's going to build the biggest muscle.
Today I'm going to share some home gym bodybuilding exercises where you can make fine adjustments to the resistance that are not body weight exercises. These are not bodyweight exercises with added resistance. These are pure equipment kettlebell, cable system and landmine exercises.
Cable Crunch
This is one of my favorite ab exercises. With this exercise, as with all cable exercises, you can perform this with bands instead. I actually recommend doing this three weeks with one of these and then swapping out to the other one. That will change the type of stimulus applied to your muscles and will help you achieve better muscle growth in the long run.
Set your cable system to the high setting using the rope attachment.
Grab the ropes with both hands.
Face away from the cable system.
Go down on your knees and then slowly lift the weight up, bringing the handles to the side of your head. This is the starting position.
Engaging your core muscles, not your back, bend over, squeeze and then raise it back up.
Kettlebell Woodchops
This is a really effective exercise for working your obliques on the side of your torso. And it's a lot of fun, too.
Grab your kettlebell. Hopefully it's adjustable like mine. Feel free to go heavy with this one if you want.
Crouch to the side while holding the kettlebell with both hands, and swing up.
Really engage your core and support it by bracing.
When you finish on one side, swap to the other side.
Barbell Landmine Russian Twist
This is another really effective obliques exercise that focuses a bit more on time under tension. It puts the load on the obliques there and makes the duration a little bit longer than some of these other exercises. This is a great technique for building muscle.
Set up your landmine.
Grab it with both hands standing up
Using your torso, not your arms, twist to one side, twist to the other side.
Cable Woodchops
This is an obliques exercise which targets the muscle on the side of your torso. With this exercise, you can do the high setting like I'm doing today, or you can do the low setting. That will target the obliques at a different angle. Mix it up. Change how you do it based on how long you've been doing which one of this variant, plus also the other exercises you're doing in your workout routine.
Attach the rope attachment.
This time we're going to slide it out to one end and hold one end with both hands.
Set yourself facing a 90 degree angle away from the cable system.
Twist your body to raise the weight, then lower it back down.
Once you’ve done one side, turn around, face the other way, and do the same thing.
There you have it, some really effective ab exercises that you can do in your home gym whilst doing fine adjustments to the weights to get the most out of your training. Stay tuned for more home gym bodybuilding tips from Tokyo Titan
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