Unilateral Exercises – Bilateral exercises like barbell squats, deadlifts, bench press, and cleans are very important parts of your workout program. Learn about how unilateral exercises can help to address and fix muscle imbalances, improve core stability, decrease risk of injury, and more.
Fixing Muscle Imbalances with Unilateral Exercises
When you only do bilateral exercises, it’s possible that there are muscle and movement imbalances that can easily go unnoticed when performing the exercise. Since the stronger side will automatically try and compensate for the balance, this also increases the chance of injury and overall discomfort. These exercises are a great way to recognize and correct these movement and muscle imbalances, and improve them to better support your bilateral exercise progress.
How to Improve Core Stability with Unilateral Exercises
Unilateral movements are also a great way to challenge your core muscles and improve your core stability, since it pushes your core to support the imbalance load.
Improving Sport Performance
Majority of the movement in sports is done unilaterally, meaning you are always in a staggered stance or are putting your bodyweight or more of your power into one side of your body. These can be utilized as part of the assistance work to improve sports performance.
Breaking Past Plateaus
Unilateral movements are also a great tool to help break past plateaus for your compound lifts; by practicing with the unilateral versions of your compound and other bilateral movements, you are working to fix the imbalances or maybe a limit in your range of motion which will translate into your bilateral exercises.
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