Identify & Fix Muscle Imbalances & Injury Risks

I want you to imagine for a second that I could increase your best race time ever by seven or eight seconds by only increasing your ankle range of motion by a single degree.

You don't have to actually run that exercise because that's been done scientifically, and it turns out to be true.

To put this in context a little bit, that seven seconds might be what it takes for you to finally cross below that twenty-four minute mark if you're an elite male running your best eight K time.

Or maybe you're a woman and you're trying to finally get below twenty minutes in that six K.

But remember, that's only for a single degree change.

Imagine how much you could improve if we got two or three or even four degrees difference in that ankle range of motion.

See, this is not just about ankle range of motion.

In this particular case, what we're talking about is reducing the asymmetry or the difference in range of motion between the two legs.

Most of you have seen this classic Vitruvian man, right? Leonardo da Vinci's perfect symmetry between the human body, and it's romantic for us to think about that.

And in fact, in the early nineteen hundreds, we thought that the symmetrical human was the perfect thing to be.

If you looked at an athlete, you would pick the one who's the most symmetrical to be the most successful in all sports.

But that turned out to not be true.

In, in fact, the wonderful writer David Epstein, if you've ever read his tremendous book, The Sports Gene, outlined and talked about how the body type explosion happened recently after that, where we started to realize some sports and activities require asymmetry, and in fact, are given a huge advantage when limbs aren't the same length and when the body doesn't work exactly the same way on all sides.

Today, we're gonna dive into this because there's also the reality that shows people that have asymmetries, particularly in their lower body, increase their injury risk by as much as thirty-five percent.

So which is it? Do asymmetries help us or do they hurt us? We all have them.

The most common one is what we call handedness.

You're right-handed or you're left-handed.

That exists in every human, well, at least about ninety-eight percent of us.

That other two percent can use both sides pretty equally.

For over five thousand years, we've been acknowledging the fact that we at least have some different skill on one side of our hand versus the other side.

And the general rule of thumb you're gonna hear is ten percent.

Now, I want you to remember this number because we're gonna come back to this over and over and over again today.

The difference between one side of your body, front and back, top to bottom, left to right, as long as it's within about ten percent, then you're fine.

But we actually know scientifically that's not the case.

And in fact, if you look at the research on this, one recent review came out that looked at over six thousand athletes and found that across the thirty studies, about a third of the research found that asymmetries led to more injury.