Side Bend with Dumbbell

🎯 Abdominals🏋️ DumbbellBeginnerIsolation

How to do the side bend with dumbbell

  1. Stand with your feet shoulder width apart, your knees slightly bent and your abs drawn in.
  2. Grasp a dumbbell in one hand and standing straight upright, bend at the waist as far as possible to one side.
  3. Slowly return back up to the staring position.
  4. Switch the dumbbell to your other hand and repeat the exercise.
  5. Note: Be careful to bend only at your waist and not at the hips or knees.

Muscles worked

The prime movers are the rectus abdominis and the obliques, which flex the trunk forward and resist it being pulled into extension or twisted out of line.

Every exercise for:Abdominals

How this movement works

One joint changes angle and the resistance travels toward you along a single arc. Nothing is positioned to help, so tension stays where you aimed it and the usable load drops sharply against a multi-joint pull for the same muscle. Protect the range of motion; buying weight by shortening the arc defeats the point.

It is filed under strength: produce force against resistance for a countable number of repetitions, and progress the resistance over time.

What you need

Dumbbells let each side work on its own, surfacing a strength difference between limbs that a barbell would quietly cover for, and leaving the wrist free to rotate through the movement.

Every exercise using:Dumbbell

These train the abdominals too, using equipment this one does not:

Difficulty

Listed at beginner level: the pattern is simple enough to pick up without coaching, and a position that goes wrong mid-set is obvious enough to correct on the next repetition.

Of the 97 abdominals exercises in this database, 69 are listed at beginner level.

Related exercises

Illustration: Everkinetic — CC BY-SA 4.0 — license. Modified versions are shared under the same license. Full attribution →

ⓘ Informational only — not a substitute for professional fitness or medical advice.