#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, 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? [laughs] 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 a leg extension machine, leg curl machine.

So how are you gonna know whether you have an imbalance? [laughs] 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.