What Are Side Bends Actually Good For?

A few years ago, I made a video saying you should stop doing side bends.

People had opinions.

And looking back, there’s one thing I should have made clearer:

Side bends aren’t a bad exercise. They’re a limited one.

If your goal is specifically bodybuilding, hypertrophy, or developing isolated lateral trunk strength, they may fit perfectly well into your program.

That’s just not the question I’m usually trying to answer.

When I talk about core training, I’m thinking about health, function, athleticism, and longevity. I want exercises that help you control your trunk, move well, transfer force, and eventually perform whatever your life or sport asks you to do.

That’s where my argument against spending much time on isolated side bends comes from.

“But Side Bends Train the Obliques”

They do.

I’m not arguing that your obliques somehow turn off when you hold a dumbbell and bend sideways.

If your goal is specifically to load those muscles through lateral flexion, that’s a perfectly reasonable reason to do the exercise.

But training a muscle isn’t automatically the same thing as training a useful movement strategy.

That’s the distinction I’m interested in.

Two Things That Make the Rest of This Make Sense

I use two simple frameworks for core training.

The first is the Core ABCs: Alignment, Breathing, Control.

Alignment means finding a useful relationship between your rib cage, pelvis, and spine. A relatively neutral position is usually our starting point because it puts you in a better position to use the diaphragm and abdominal wall together.

Neutral doesn’t mean perfectly straight, and it definitely doesn’t mean you have to stay there. Neutral is a range. We need to be able to leave it and control what happens when we do.

Breathing doesn’t just mean getting oxygen.

You’re alive. You’ve got that part covered.

Respiration is the diaphragm’s primary job. Its secondary role is postural stability. The diaphragm works with the abdominal wall and pelvic floor to create and regulate intra-abdominal pressure, helping stabilize the trunk at the same time you’re breathing.

And position matters here.

If your rib cage and pelvis aren’t organized well, you can’t generate pressure as fully or ideally. That’s something we can demonstrate pretty quickly by changing someone’s position and having them breathe and brace again.

The goal isn’t maximum pressure all the time, either.

It’s as much as necessary and as little as possible.

Picking up something light requires very little. Pulling a heavy barbell off the floor requires considerably more.

Then there’s Control: can you coordinate all of this across the range of movement available to you?

Alignment. Breathing. Control.

Those principles follow you whether you’re lying on the floor doing rehab or swinging a golf club as hard as you can.

If you want to learn the Core ABCs from the ground up, that’s exactly what I teach in the Core Strength + Stability Course. The goal isn’t harder core exercises. It’s understanding how to use your core better before making the exercises harder.

Then There’s the Core AMP

Anti-Move. Move. Perform.

AMP is the progression model I use for loading the core.

We start by teaching the trunk to resist or control an external demand. Then we introduce deliberate movement. Eventually we integrate that control into more complex, loaded, and athletic tasks.

That doesn’t mean every exercise fits neatly into one box. The same exercise can move through different parts of AMP depending on how we use it.

And it doesn’t mean you’re forbidden from moving until you’ve passed some imaginary anti-movement test.

It’s a progression principle.

You shouldn’t push the pedal to the metal before you know how to pump the brakes.

I see plenty of people who are already doing advanced core exercises, lifting, running, golfing, or playing sports, but struggle when we take away the speed and ask them to control something relatively simple.

That’s useful information.

If you can’t control the simpler demand, adding more speed, load, range, and complexity probably isn’t where I want to start.

So What Would I Do Instead of Side Bends?

Take a suitcase carry.

Hold a weight on one side and walk without letting it pull you wherever it wants.

At its simplest, we’re asking your trunk to resist the lateral demand while your legs move underneath you.

But AMP is flexible.

Change the load, speed, position, range, or intent and the same general exercise can start asking for more movement and coordination.

Around-the-world variations are another example. Keep them controlled and the emphasis may be resisting the moving load. Change how you perform them and now the trunk, hips, and legs can participate more.

Pendulum-style exercises can progress the same way. Start by controlling the movement of the weight. Add movement of your own. Bring the hips and legs into it. Add speed.

Eventually we’re moving toward performance.

That’s an important part of AMP:

It doesn’t just classify exercises. It gives us a way to progress them.

Anti-Move. Move. Perform.

Then we can turn all the smaller dials inside of that.

“But You Side Bend in Golf”

Absolutely.

But you don’t just side bend.

A golf swing combines lateral flexion with rotation, flexion and extension, shifting, hip movement, force from the ground, and coordination between the upper and lower body.

That’s exactly why I’d rather eventually train those things together.

We might start with something like a Pallof heartbeat where the goal is controlling rotation. From there, a Pallof variation can introduce controlled rotation. Eventually we can add more of the hips, trunk, lateral flexion, speed, and force involved in the actual task.

I’m still training side bending.

I’m just integrating it into a progression that has somewhere to go.

The same idea applies to boxing.

Control a punch position. Add rotation. Add the rest of the body. Add speed and power.

And there are plenty of smaller dials we can turn along the way: load, cadence, repetitions, duration, range, and frequency.

AMP gives me the broad progression.

Then I adjust the knobs.

“The Core Is for Stabilizing”

Agreed.

That’s my point.

Stabilization is the ability to control change.

To take that one step further, it’s your ability to control your position and movement as the demands of the task change.

You need stability when you’re resisting movement.

You need stability while you’re moving.

And you definitely need it when you’re moving quickly, producing force, or playing a sport.

So stability isn’t one category of core exercise.

It’s what you’re doing the whole way through.

“Side Bends Are Functional”

Also true.

We side bend in life.

But functional isn’t a yes or no. It’s a scale.

The question isn’t whether your spine ever bends sideways.

Of course it does.

The better question is what you’re preparing your body to do.

If I’m carrying a suitcase, swinging a golf club, throwing a punch, working in the yard, or playing with my kids, lateral flexion rarely happens as an isolated event. It’s happening alongside movement and force somewhere else.

That’s why I tend to progress toward exercises that integrate it.

A windmill can combine lateral flexion with a hip hinge and shoulder control.

We can also use a half-kneeling position, which comes directly from our developmental movement sequence around 11 months. That developmental position gives us a useful starting point to organize the trunk and pelvis, then we can layer movement onto it.

From there, maybe we side bend. Maybe we press overhead. Maybe we progress into a more demanding whole-body movement like an overhead squat or Turkish get-up.

We’re not avoiding side bending. We’re giving it context.

That’s a very different argument from saying side bends are bad for you.

What This Is Actually About

Minimal effective dose.

I’m a busy professional. I don’t want to spend two hours a day in the gym, and neither do most of my patients.

So if two exercises can move me toward the same goal and one gives me more useful carryover, I’m usually picking that one.

That doesn’t mean isolation exercises are useless.

Sometimes isolation is exactly what you want.

But for general core training, I tend to keep things stupid simple.

Start with Alignment, Breathing, and Control.

Then use Anti-Move, Move, Perform to progress the demand.

And ask one more question:

What is this actually preparing me to do?

That’s the point I was trying to make in that original side-bend video.

It just took me a few years to explain it better.

And if this way of thinking about core training makes more sense to you than collecting random core exercises, I built the Core Strength + Stability Course to teach the system step by step.