Unilateral work in the gym

What I mean by unilateral work in the gym is single leg or single arm work and I shall share some example down below. Everything we do in the gym and in our day to day lives we all have a stronger side, we favour a particular side whether it be carrying the shopping to the car or having one leg do most the work in a squat.

So we all have imbalances. The reason we should all do unilateral work is to try minimalise the difference from side to side. Why would you not want your left arm to be as strong as your right arm or vice versa?

Not only will this type of training make you much more evenly strong but can actually help with your posture, so that your hips are level or your shoulders are level. – Females may notice this carrying their bag on one shoulder over a period of time and that that shoulder will sit higher than the other.

Here are some examples:

1. Single leg leg press

2. Single leg RDL’s (Romanian Deadlift)

3. Single arm overhead press

4. Single arm row

*footnote, when training like this always start with your weaker side, so that you are only as strong as your weakest link and you are not feeding an imbalance. Say you are aiming for 10 reps each side, do the weaker side first and if you can only manage 9 reps you would then replicate 9 reps on the stronger side. This allows the weaker side to catch up.

I am not saying you should purely just train unilateral but I am saying it is an excellent tool to use. Every now and again throw a unilateral exercise into your program. You will also find that if you do have an imbalance and you start correcting that when you go back to bilateral (2 arms or 2 legs) you will actually be stronger because one side is not doing majority of the work.