#173: Is One Side of Your Body Stronger Than the Other?

Have you noticed that one side of your body is stronger than the other? Maybe your right arm pushes the dumbbell up a little easier than your left.

It's more common than you think.

In this episode I share two strategies for evening things out, including the clever one I'm using right now on my own legs, because yes, the gap got bigger than I'd like to admit. I'll tell you how I let that happen, even while trying my best not to.

If one side has been quietly running the show, this one's for you.

Enjoy the show!

Resources mentioned:

My Membership, progressive programming with unilateral work built in >

See all my programs > 

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 1:25

Welcome to 40 Plus Fitness for Women. I'm Lynn Sedderloff, I resto, your host, and I'm a certified menopause fitness coach. And I help women start strength training so they can build the bodies that they want to spend the rest of their lives in. Have you noticed that one side of your body is stronger than the other? Like your left arm is stronger than your right arm, or vice versa. And how would you even test for that? And by the way, what should you do if that's the situation? So let's get into that topic today. Now it is not at all unusual to be stronger on one side than the other. And often it will happen because of maybe an old injury, maybe one side is stronger than the other, and your body is preferring that side instead. For me, for example, I dislocated my left hip back when I was a child. And ever since then, my body has kind of been careful about my left leg, my left hip, and used my right side preferentially. And if you have a situation like that, then what will happen over time if you're doing bilateral work is that you may end up with one side stronger than the other. So what is a bilateral movement, first of all? That would be something where both of your limbs are pushing on the equipment at the same time. So it could be anything from a leg press where you're using both feet on the machine at the same time. If you're using a barbell, like chest press using a barbell or shoulder presses using a barbell, a lot of the machines you're using both legs at the same time, like leg extension machine, leg curl machine. So how are you gonna know whether you have an imbalance? Well, that's where unilateral work really comes in. So hopefully, in your programming, you have some blocks where you are doing unilateral movements. Now, this is something that I program into my blocks so that at least every other block, I'm doing unilateral work on the legs and unilateral work on the upper body as well. So for legs, for example, it would be things like doing a unilateral leg press. So you're pressing on the machine one leg at a time, you know, you do your right side, then you do your left side. For upper body stuff, um, even just using dumbbells. So each hand arm needs to work independently, then that is going to allow you to make sure that they're staying even. In fact, I think with arm exercises, it is probably easier to maintain them being quite even because so many arm exercises use dumbbells or cables in a way where you're working unilaterally. So even if you're using both at the same time, like let's say a shoulder press where you're using dumbbells, each one needs to be pushing its very own dumbbell up there. Your right hand can't help your left hand push its dumbbell up there. So let's say that you notice that hey, one side is stronger than the other. How do you fix this? First of all, you need to be doing your unilateral work. And when you are doing your unilateral set, start with your weaker leg. Do what you can do with your weaker leg. So, for example, if you can do six reps with your weaker leg, when you switch over to doing your stronger leg, you do six reps on that side. Then you take your break between sets, then you go again, weaker leg first for as many reps as you can do, match it with the stronger leg. Now, it can take a little while for you to build up that way. So if you kind of want to speed up that process of evening things out, especially if the discrepancy is pretty big, like mine is at this point, then there are a couple of tricks you can do to kind of speed that up. The first one is that you do an extra set with just your weaker leg. So what that looks like is I would do my unilateral leg press sets. I'd do three sets, and then I would do a fourth set with just my weaker side. Now, this is not perfect because if you think about it, the stimulus that you get from each set goes down. So your first set has the most bang for the buck, then the second one, then the third. So the fourth one is not a huge stimulus for muscle growth and strength growth. It's better than nothing, but it's not like this amazing stimulus. So a more clever way of doing this, if it's possible, in your strength training program, would be to actually give that weaker side a couple of extra first sets during the week. So, how does that work? So it would mean adding, in a way, another training day for that leg. Okay. So for me, I train upper body and lower body separately. I train lower body twice a week, upper body twice a week. So to strengthen my weaker left leg, what I would do is that on one of my upper body days, I would do two sets of legs. Okay. So I'd otherwise do my exact same upper body program, but then I might do one set of leg presses with just my weaker leg and just one set. Of course, I do my warm-up set, but then I do my one working set, and same thing on another exercise that's in my program right then with just the weaker leg. So right now it's B stance RDLs. So I would warm up my left leg, my weak leg only on the B stance RDLs, and do one set, one working set of that. And that'll help my leg catch up a lot faster. Now, of course, that may be a little bit harder logistically to fit into your week because you should leave at least one day of rest before training your leg again. So maybe you're gonna be doing lower body one day and upper body the following day. So then that kind of strategy won't work. So just put in the extra set for that weaker side. Okay. So I hope that made sense. But hopefully, your programming has this kind of unilateral work where your arms are working separately, they cannot help each other, right? It's good to have that unilateral work programmed into your program so that you don't end up with these discrepancies. I have been being lazy or not lazy, but I've been trying to save time in the weight room. I thought, okay, I'm just gonna be really conscious of using my weaker leg enough. And yeah, it's amazing how our body can trick us, even if we're doing our very best to not allow it to make us one-sided. Yeah. So now I'm paying the price, and for a little while I'll be doing a lot of unilateral work, and my training sessions will take a little bit longer. But anyway, hopefully that won't happen to you. But now, if it does, you know what to do about it. If you have any other kind of strength training issues or things that you want to have clarified, then please reach out. I would love to hear what you are pondering or what you're struggling with because I'd love to help. And with that, I leave you till next week and wish you happy training.