Unilateral exercises... what are they?

You may have seen it in a fitness magazine or overheard someone talking about it at the gym and wondered what it was. Well… this is when you work one side of the body at a time so an example of this would be a step up. As opposed to a bilateral movement like a squat or deadlift where you use both sides simultaneously to complete the task.

One of the main reasons for incorporating these types of moves into your workout is to reduce and even correct muscular imbalances. When you force each side of the body to work independently from each other your dominant side cannot compensate and take over. This will help to strengthen your weaker side as it will have to do all the work and therefore recruit more muscle fibers.

Another very important benefit of adding unilateral exercises to your routine is that it helps to build your core stability. Your core muscles have to work harder to maintain posture and balance to compensate for the disparity in weight. I feel that core stability (generation and transfer of energy with good mechanics) is underrated bearing in mind it’s pretty much involved in every action.

Last but definitely not least it helps to increase resistance to injury and we all know that prevention is better than cure. The reason why is that the muscles stabilising the joints have to work overtime in order to control the movement. These will strengthen and act as a support team to the working muscles (the movers) enabling them to work better together.

Most of the time I would use a unilateral movement towards the end of the session as an accessory exercise. I hope that this article has explained the main benefits of unilateral training and why it should not be overlooked. Please visit my blog again soon as I will be uploading some videos in order to demonstrate a few key unilateral movements.