Name: If You Have Love Handles Do This Exercise (NO CARDIO)
Uploaded: 2026-02-12T08:30:03.000Z
Duration: 11 min
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

If you want to lose love handles, you need to do two things.

Transition words & phrases

First, burn overall body fat because you can't spot reduce.

Second, strengthen your obliques, the muscles on the sides of your waist.

Now, research shows some exercises are far better at burning calories, and

others activate the obliques much harder, up to 300% more than regular crunches.

I went through the studies and selected five exercises that do both jobs best.

The first exercise activates your obliques at 107%.

But let me explain what that number actually means.

It tracks the electrical signals your muscles send when they contract.

The harder a muscle works, the stronger the signal.

To create a baseline, they first ask someone to flex their abs as hard as they physically can.

That maximum effort is called 100% activation.

And when researchers tested the side plank, they found the internal oblique, the deep muscle on the side of your waist, was firing at 107%.

That means the muscle is being recruited even more efficiently than in a standard maximum test.

The study was published in the Journal of Sport Rehabilitation, and

the researchers concluded that the side plank is one of the most effective exercises for strengthening the lateral core, the sides of your torso where love handles form.

You lie on your side and hold your body up using just your forearm and the side of your foot.

Head, shoulders, hips and feet all aligned.

The key is keeping your hips lifted off the ground.

When you hold that position, your obliques have to fire constantly to stop your body from collapsing.

If it's too hard, drop to your knees instead of your feet.

This exercise won't burn a massive amount of calories.

Its job is to build serious strength and muscular endurance in your obliques.

Now, the second exercise ranked number one out of 13 AB exercises tested in a controlled EMG study.

And the gap between first place and everything else wasn't even close.

The American Council on Exercise wanted to find out which ab exercises actually activate the muscles the most.

So they brought participants into a lab, attached EMG sensors to their muscles, and

had them perform 13 of the most common ab exercises.

They measured oblique activation for every single movement.

The bicycle crunch won, and it wasn't a small victory.

Here's the the bicycle crunch produced roughly 290% more oblique muscle activity compared to a standard crunch used as the baseline.

That's nearly three times the Oblique activation and the researchers noted that exercises involving trunk rotation, twisting your torso, combined with abdominal stabilization generated the highest oblique activity.

The bicycle crunch does both at the same time, so lie flat on your back.

Place your hands lightly behind your head.

Lift your shoulder blades off the ground and bring your knees up.

Straighten your right leg out while pulling your left knee toward your chest.

At the same time, rotate your upper body and bring your right elbow toward your left knee.

Twist and bring your left elbow toward your right knee.

Keep alternating like you're pedaling a bicycle.

That rotational movement is what creates the massive oblique activation the study measured.

This one works differently than the first two.

Side planks and bicycle crunches Use your body weight.

This one adds external resistance, either a cable machine or resistance band, which changes how your obliques are loaded.

They rotate your torso, twisting left and right, and

they resist rotation, stopping your torso from twisting when force tries to pull you.

The woodchopper trains both functions at the same time.

When you pull the cable or band across your body, your obliques contract to create the rotational force.

And when you control the weight back to the starting position, your obliques work to resist and slow down the rotation.

That means tension on your obliques throughout the entire movement, both directions.

You can use a cable machine or a resistance band anchored to something sturdy.

I'll explain the high to low version first, then the low to high variation first.

High to low woodchopper Attach the cable or band above your head.

Stand with your side to the anchor point.

Grab the handle with both hands, arms extended.

Your feet should be about shoulder width apart.

Now rotate your torso and pull the cable down and across your body in a diagonal chopping motion, like you're swinging an axe to chop wood.

The movement should go from up near your shoulder, down toward the opposite hip.

The power comes from rotating your core, not bending your elbows.

Your hips can rotate slightly, but most of the movement should come from your torso.

Control the weight back to the starting position, and don't let it snap back.

That controlled return is where your obliques resist the rotation.

Now let me show you Low to high Woodchopper.

Same setup, but anchor the cable or band low near the floor.

You pull from low to high across your body, like you're lifting something from the ground and throwing it over your opposite shoulder.

Both of these versions work, and you can do both or pick whichever feels better.

Use a weight or band tension that challenges you but lets you control the movement.

If you're jerking or using momentum, it's too heavy.

Now those three three exercises Build your obliques.

But remember what I said at the beginning.

You could have the strongest, most developed obliques in the world.

But if there's a layer of fat sitting on top, your waist will still look soft and undefined.

The fourth exercise isn't about building the obliques.

It's about burning the fat that's covering them.

And the science on fat loss is extremely clear about what works best.

Here's what the research shows about fat loss and exercise intensity.

Multiple studies have found that higher intensity exercises reduce abdominal fat significantly more than moderate intensity exercises, even when total calories burned are similar.

So if your goal is to burn fat off your love handles, intensity matters.

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If You Have Love Handles Do This Exercise (NO CARDIO)

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