While planks are an effective move to include in your core sessions, you don’t need them for a great abs workout. There are many other bodyweight exercises that are perfect for sculpting your abs and obliques, starting with classics like sit-ups and bicycle crunches.
This 10-minute abs and obliques workout has been created by YouTube fitness trainer FitByMik, and it doesn’t contain any planks, which will be good news to those looking to protect their wrists. Instead you’ll be working through an array of crunches, sit-ups and twisting exercises to target all of your core muscles.
You don’t need any weights to do the workout, with the only piece of kit required being one of the best yoga mats to protect your floor and make some of the moves more comfortable if you’re on a hard surface.
Watch FitByMik’s 10-minute abs workout
The workout involves doing 10 core exercises with minimal rest in the allotted 10 minutes. You’ll be working for 50 seconds and resting for just 10 seconds, although you can add in more breaks if you need to — when I tried the session I found some of the moves to difficult to do for 50 seconds straight.
Where possible, try and push through the 50 seconds though, because this will maximize the time under tension for your core muscles, which is key to making them stronger and more defined.
The mix of moves involve raising your torso off the floor to work the upper abs, raising your legs to hit the lower abs, and then twisting exercises that make sure your obliques are also working hard during the session.
Moves like bicycle crunches where you lift the upper body and legs while twisting are effective in working almost all the key core muscles, and you’ll be doing a couple of rounds of bicycle crunches in the middle of the workout, working each side in turn.
The session is also good for working the deep core muscles that are central to your functional strength and general posture. Adding workouts like this to your regular routine will have knock-on benefits for your other strength sessions, because a strong core helps with all manner of other lifts.
I’ve tried this and several other 10-minute core workouts over the past couple of months and rate this session as one of the hardest, partly because of the absence of planks. You stay on your back the whole time as a result, and quickly work through a lot of moves that hit the same muscles, which is great for making them stronger, but certainly quite tough.
If you’d rather stay standing for your core workout, give this 12-minute standing abs workout a try. You’ll need a set of weights for it, but it’s a great way to work your core without having to do sit-ups and crunches.
Are 10-minute workouts effective?
When it comes to exercise, doing anything is always better than doing nothing at all, and 10-minute workouts are certainly effective in raising your heart rate and strengthening the muscles you are targeting in that session.
To get the most from a short workout like this you have to make sure you know what you are doing for the 10 minutes, and push hard during the session. Extra breaks to see what move is coming or to glance at your phone notifications will cut into your training time, and when time is limited it's key to focus and work hard throughout.
I'd say that the core is one area you can certainly target effectively in just 10-minutes, because you can exhaust the upper and lower abs quickly with the right moves, and if you try this session you'll finish with no doubts that you've done some good work on your core strength.
More from Tom's Guide
- A Pilates instructor shares an 8-minute Pilates abs workout for deep core activation — so I tried it
- Forget sit-ups — this no-equipment ab workout blasts your deep core
- Three 10-minute ab workouts that hit all your core muscles
