reckonerStanding cable side bend
One handle, one hand, and a bend straight out to the side against the pull. It is the most direct way to load the muscles down the side of your trunk, and it is also the exercise most often bought for a reason it cannot deliver.
Bend straight to the side, no twist.
- Pattern
- Core anti-extension
- Trains
- Obliques
- Kit
- Cable
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 3 sets of 8 to 12 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 2.5 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Skill
- Simple to learn
- Recovery cost
- Very low
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Lower back
Muscles worked
How to do it
Stand tall beside a low pulley
Feet about hip width, handle in the hand nearest the stack, arm hanging straight. Stand far enough away that the cable is already loaded when you are upright.
Let the cable pull you over
Lower slowly toward the stack, bending straight out to the side, until you feel a stretch down the opposite side of your torso. Nothing rotates and nothing folds forward.
Pull yourself back with the far side
Come back to upright by shortening the side away from the stack rather than by pushing off your legs. The free arm stays out of it.
Stop at upright, then reset
There is no need to bend past vertical the other way. Finish tall, hold for a beat, and go again. Do both sides before you call the set done.
What goes wrong
Turning as you bend
Rotation sneaks in because it makes the range feel bigger. A side bend that turns is no longer loading the side of the trunk through the range you set up for.
Leaning the whole body away to counterbalance
With a heavy stack the hips slide out to the opposite side and the torso stays put. The weight moves, and your trunk did none of it.
Holding a dumbbell in the other hand too
A weight on each side cancels most of the load out, which is why the two-dumbbell version of this is mostly a way of holding heavy things while standing still.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 20 kg, run through the real engine. Nothing below was typed in: the prescription, the decision and the sentence beside it all come from the same code that writes your week.
| Week | Prescribed | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 3 x 8 at 20 kg | More reps 8 → 9 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 3 x 9 at 20 kg | More reps 9 → 10 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 3 x 10 at 20 kg | More reps 10 → 11 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 3 x 11 at 20 kg | More reps 11 → 12 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 5 | 3 x 12 at 20 kg | Deload 40% of sets offFive weeks of building, then one week lighter. About 40% of the sets come off. The load holds and your reps stay where you earned them, so you keep the strength and lose the fatigue. |
| 6 | 2 x 12 at 20 kg | Load up 20 kg → 22.5 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 2.5 kg to 22.5 kg and reps reset to eight. The lighter week is over, so this is back to three sets. |
Real engine output, not an illustration. Every row was produced by running the engine itself when this page was generated.
The full rule, and why the reps move before the load does, is in how Reckoner decides to add weight.
Questions people ask
Will side bends get rid of my love handles?
No, and this is the reason most people find this page. Six weeks of abdominal training in sedentary adults, food held level, improved abdominal endurance and left body fat, abdominal girth and skinfolds exactly where they were1. Training a muscle does not remove the fat sitting over it.
Will they make my waist wider?
Nobody has measured that, so this page does not answer it either way. What is fair to say is that the loads people use on this movement are small, the muscles involved are small, and the change any of it makes to your outline is far behind what you eat.
Cable or dumbbell?
The cable, if there is one. It keeps tension on through the whole range including the top, where a dumbbell hanging beside you has almost none. Reckoner prescribes the cable version because that is what the library carries.
Similar movements
Reckoner has no other movement in this swap group.
Sources
- Vispute and colleagues, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2011. The effect of abdominal exercise on abdominal fat twenty-four sedentary adults randomized to six weeks of abdominal training or nothing on an isocaloric diet, with no significant effect on body weight, body fat percentage, android fat, abdominal circumference or either skinfold, and a significant improvement in abdominal muscular endurance