Fitness Fitness Tips Good Moves

This 3-Way Core Workout Targets Your Obliques, Back, and Abs In 20 Minutes Flat

Saanya Ali

November 30, 2021

It's easy to discount at-home workouts as "less effective" or "not as hard" as in-gym circuits. Most don't require weights, you can take them at your own pace, and you can even have Gossip Girl playing in the background. That means they should be a breeze, right? Uh, not so much. On this episode of Good Moves, trainer, Traci Copeland, takes us through a 20-minute bodyweight core strength workout that proves that all you need to really strengthen and tone your abs and back is your own body (and maybe a mat). Follow along through two rounds of two sets of 30-second exercises that will have your whole core fired up in no time.

Experts In This Article

Traci Copeland, Nike Master Trainer, yoga instructor, and fitness model

Copeland starts the workout with a two-minute warm up that preps your muscles to work and uses lunges and twists to loosen up your joints and get your blood pumping before diving right into the first set. The twists from the warm-up carry through the whole workout ensuring that when you're working your core, you're not just focusing on your front ab muscles, but your obliques and back as well. According to Copeland, the most important things to remember throughout the sets are to keep your core engaged the entire time, to use controlled core strength to power you through the movements rather than relying on momentum to propel you, and to breathe through the exercises so you work on building your muscular endurance as well as your respiratory strength.

What makes this at-home bodyweight core workout so great is that Copeland gives you modifications the whole way through to help ease some of the exercises to your personal difficulty preference and adjustments that you can make to level up the movements if you're more advanced. "You can go as slow or as fast as you need to," explains Copeland, but remember to squeeze your core through the rotations and twists to make sure that you are keeping all 360 degrees of your core engaged. You'll definitely be feeling the burn by the second set.

Ready to work your core to the extreme? Click on the video above to follow along with Copeland as she walks you through a 20-minute bodyweight core workout that you can do anywhere you can place a mat.

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