What muscles do weighted Russian twists work?

The obliques do the turning, working in pairs across your body: rotating to one side uses the internal oblique on that side with the external oblique on the other. Your abs hold the lean-back angle without moving and your hip flexors hold your legs up. The obliques are the target, the rest are holding you in place.

Am I doing Russian twists wrong if I feel it in my hips?

Not wrong so much as limited by the wrong thing. With your feet in the air your hip flexors work for the whole set, and they often give out before the sides of your trunk do. Put your heels on the floor and the set will end for the right reason.

How far should you twist on a Russian twist?

Less far than most demonstrations show. Your lower back has only a handful of degrees of turn in it, and your upper back a good deal more, so a huge arc is your arms and hips moving rather than your trunk. Turn your chest and let the plate follow it.

Are Russian twists bad for your lower back?

The honest answer is that nobody has tested the exercise in people. What has been tested is the loading pattern, in pig spine segments, where combining a twist with repeated bending separated the layers of the disc wall in 67.5 percent of specimens while either one alone largely did not. That is a reason to keep the plate modest and the speed low, not a verdict on your back.

What can you do instead of Russian twists?

A side plank held on your toes produced significantly more external oblique activity than a curl-up, a sit-up or a face-down plank when they were compared. Anti-rotation holds, where you resist a pull trying to turn you, work the same muscle while your spine stays still. Both get the obliques without the twist.

Do Russian twists give you a smaller waist?

No. They train the muscles at the sides of your trunk, and what those muscles look like from outside depends on what is over them, which no exercise controls. Anything promising a smaller waist from a twisting movement is selling something.

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Plate · intermediate · waist

Plate russian twist weighted

Also called Russian twist, Seated twist, Weighted Russian twist, Plate Russian twist.

The short answer

A weighted Russian twist sits you on the floor leaning back with your feet up, holding a plate, and turns your torso from side to side. Your obliques do the turning, and they do it in pairs: to rotate left, the internal oblique on your left works with the external oblique on your right. Your abs never move, they just hold the lean-back angle for the whole set, and your hip flexors hold your legs off the floor. The catch is that a torso rotates far less than the size of the arc suggests, which is why so many sets of this are mostly arms.

How to do it

Step oneSit on the floor with your knees bent and feet slightly elevated, holding a weight plate or dumbbell with both hands.
Step twoLean back slightly to create tension in your core, keeping your spine straight.
Step threeRotate your torso to the right, bringing the weight towards the floor beside your hip.
Step fourReturn to center and rotate to the left, repeating the movement on the opposite side.
Step fiveContinue alternating sides.

What usually goes wrong

Each starts with what you would notice.

The plate travels a long way side to side, but your chest keeps facing straight ahead.

WhyYour arms are long and your trunk does not rotate much, so given the choice the arms will make the arc. The plate ends up beside your hip because your shoulders swung it there, not because you turned.

FixHold the plate close to your chest and turn your breastbone toward the side you are working, letting the plate go wherever your chest is pointing. The arc gets much smaller. That smaller arc is the part that was ever yours.

The front of your hips is burning and the sides of your trunk are not.

WhyWith your feet off the floor your hip flexors are holding your legs up for the entire set, and for a lot of people that is what runs out first. The set then ends for a reason that has nothing to do with the muscle you came for.

FixPut your heels down. Rotating with your feet on the floor is not a lesser version, it just removes the thing that was ending your sets early.

You sink further back as the set goes on and your lower back starts to round.

WhyYour abs are holding that lean-back angle without moving, and when they tire the angle gets held by your spine bending instead. Nothing announces the handover.

FixSit taller than feels necessary at the start, and end the set when the chest drops rather than when the count does. This is the point at which continuing stops adding anything.

The plate is being thrown from side to side and the reps are fast.

WhyMomentum. Once the plate is swinging, the turn at each end is being stopped by the plate running out of speed rather than by your obliques stopping it.

FixTouch the plate down beside your hip, pause on it, then start the next turn from still. Fewer, slower reps here are worth a great deal more than a quick set.

How much are you actually rotating

This is worth knowing before you judge your own technique. Your lower back rotates very little: segment by segment it is a degree or two at each level, and measurements of living people put the whole lumbar spine somewhere around 7 to 15 degrees each way depending on how it is taken. Your upper back manages considerably more. The reason is the shape of the joints at the back of each vertebra: in the lower back they face in a direction that suits bending forward and backward and blocks turning, and higher up they face a direction that permits it.

So a plate sweeping through a wide arc beside you is mostly your arms and shoulders traveling, plus some upper back, plus your hips rolling on the floor. The trunk rotation buried in there is small.

That is not an argument against the exercise, it is an argument for making the movement smaller and more deliberate than it looks in most demonstrations. If your chest turns, the exercise is happening. If only the plate turns, it is not.

With a plate or without

Without a plate the movement costs almost nothing, so the arc gets wide and fast and the arm-swing problem is invisible. Adding a plate is what makes the exercise a real one, and it is also what makes doing it badly expensive.

The plate is worth adding when the unweighted version is already slow, your chest is genuinely turning, and you can hold the lean-back angle for the whole set without sagging. Then it is doing what added load should do.

It is worth leaving out when you are chasing a rep count, because a plate on a fast, swinging twist loads the one combination worth being careful about, which is the next section.

Russian twist or side plank

If your obliques are the reason you are here, there is a route to them that does not involve twisting at all. Measured against a curl-up, a bent-knee sit-up and a face-down plank, a side plank held on the toes produced significantly greater external oblique activity than any of them.

The side plank resists sideways collapse rather than producing rotation, so the trunk holds still and the muscle still works hard. Anti-rotation holds, where you resist being turned instead of turning, do the same trick.

You do not have to choose one forever. But if you want the muscle and you are unsure about the position, the holds get you the muscle without the position.

What it will not do, and the one thing worth knowing

It will not shrink your waist. No exercise decides what covers a muscle, and training the sides of your trunk does not remove anything from over them.

The thing worth knowing is about the position rather than the muscle, and both of the usual takes on it are wrong. It is not true that Russian twists are simply bad for you, and it is not true that the caution is invented.

Here is what was actually measured. Pig spine segments were loaded four ways: bending back and forth, twisting, or the two combined in either order. When twisting was combined with repeated bending, in either order, the layers of the disc wall separated in 67.5 percent of the specimens. Bending alone or twisting alone did not do that nearly so readily.

Those were pig spines in a lab, cycled far more than any set of twists, and it is not a study of people doing this exercise. It cannot tell you what your back will do. What it does tell you is that a bent spine plus a twist is the combination with the most evidence behind treating it carefully, and a Russian twist is that combination on purpose, with a plate.

The practical reading is not to stop. It is that the plate is the variable to be conservative with here, that speed is worth more caution than weight, and that if your back does not like this position there are oblique exercises that never ask for it. If something hurts and keeps hurting, that is a question for a physiotherapist rather than a website.

What it is for

The weighted russian twist is a seated rotation with a plate held at the chest, targeting the obliques, which are the muscles that turn your trunk. Your abs hold the reclined position without rotating it. The feet are raised and the torso turns side to side against the added weight.

Questions people ask

What muscles do weighted Russian twists work?: The obliques do the turning, working in pairs across your body: rotating to one side uses the internal oblique on that side with the external oblique on the other. Your abs hold the lean-back angle without moving and your hip flexors hold your legs up. The obliques are the target, the rest are holding you in place.
Am I doing Russian twists wrong if I feel it in my hips?: Not wrong so much as limited by the wrong thing. With your feet in the air your hip flexors work for the whole set, and they often give out before the sides of your trunk do. Put your heels on the floor and the set will end for the right reason.
How far should you twist on a Russian twist?: Less far than most demonstrations show. Your lower back has only a handful of degrees of turn in it, and your upper back a good deal more, so a huge arc is your arms and hips moving rather than your trunk. Turn your chest and let the plate follow it.
Are Russian twists bad for your lower back?: The honest answer is that nobody has tested the exercise in people. What has been tested is the loading pattern, in pig spine segments, where combining a twist with repeated bending separated the layers of the disc wall in 67.5 percent of specimens while either one alone largely did not. That is a reason to keep the plate modest and the speed low, not a verdict on your back.
What can you do instead of Russian twists?: A side plank held on your toes produced significantly more external oblique activity than a curl-up, a sit-up or a face-down plank when they were compared. Anti-rotation holds, where you resist a pull trying to turn you, work the same muscle while your spine stays still. Both get the obliques without the twist.
Do Russian twists give you a smaller waist?: No. They train the muscles at the sides of your trunk, and what those muscles look like from outside depends on what is over them, which no exercise controls. Anything promising a smaller waist from a twisting movement is selling something.