Exploring The Function Of The External And Internal Obliques

The obliques are part of your abdominal muscles on each side of your waist. The oblique muscles connect to the ribs, top of the hip bone, fascia of the abdominals, and lower back. They are considered twisting or waist muscles and control various movements. The Obliques are separated into two parts: Internal and External.

Function of the Obliques

Oblique muscles control bending physical activities such as bending over, twisting the torso, and side bending and aiding with breathing. The obliques help pull the chest downwards, which compresses the abdominal cavity.

External Oblique

The external oblique muscle is one of the outermost abdominal muscles, extending from the lower half of the ribs around and down to the pelvis. They originate from the lower eight ribs and are inserted into the linea alba (the connective tissue along the midline of the abdomen) and the iliac crest (the upper border of the hip bone). The external obliques have two main functions:

• Assist in trunk flexion (bending forward), assist lateral flexion (bending sideways), and rotate your trunk to the opposite side (twisting motion).
• To give you a visualization of what these muscles achieve think about movements such as side bending, twisting, and bending forward.

Internal Oblique

As the name suggests, the Internal obliques lie deep within the abdomen, under the external obliques. They accomplish more or less what the external obliques do with an emphasis on assisting the functions of its external brother. Like the externals, the internal obliques are responsible for stabilizing the core and providing proper alignment of the spine and pelvis. Additionally, contracting the obliques will create intra-abdominal pressure which provides you with a strong base for movements such as lifting a box overhead.

Targeting Obliques Through Rotation

The Obliques are very easy muscles to locate as it would be very hard to twist your body while maintaining good posture and not feel these side muscles firing. I find that athletes don’t even need to target this muscle in isolation. This is because most sports require a lot of rotational power. For those who are bodybuilding or training for aesthetics, excessively targeting the obliques for hypertrophic gains will lead to a blockier waist. So this muscle is often not trained in isolation, but those who are more sedentary, older, or maybe not training rotation movements In the gym, can benefit from training.

There are plenty of ways to target the obliques and for most, it’s very easy to target and grow. Mostly every twisting motion of the upper body will do the trick but if you are into more isolated work movements such as the side crunch, Russian v-tucks or side bends will all do the trick. Obliques are critical in nearly every sport but athletes who compete in basketball, wrestling, soccer, and virtually every combat sport can expect to improve their performance when adding a form of rotational training to their program.

General Questions

Weak and tight obliques can you you vulnerable to back injuries. Especially since most of these injuries happen because we will twist to pick something up in a range of motion we aren’t used to until we feel that sharp pain. Oblique injuries are relatively common for this reason and the older and less active you are the more susceptible you become. I’m often asked, “How do I get rid of my Love Handles” and while the obliques lie directly below “love handles”, fat loss isn’t site-specific. What I mean by that is you cannot train your obliques and expect to lose fat in only that area.

Fat loss happens across your entire body as you lower your total body fat percentage through caloric restriction. So you can get rid of love handles by simply losing weight because training your obliques won’t do the trick. for our complete guide to the core, Click Here!