One-Sided Leg Training
Allow me to ask you a few simple questions: Have you found yourself feeling a bit bored in the gym lately? Do you feel as if you’re working pretty hard but not getting much of a pump? Are you getting stronger, or are you using the same poundages week after week, month after month? Finally, and most important, are you seeing any new muscle gains?
The answers to those questions are very important because if you’re bored, not getting a pump and not getting bigger and stronger, why do you keep doing the same old thing? Do you actually think that one day your routine will magically start working for you again? Doubtful. While at one time you may have thrived on the routine you’re doing now, you’ve probably reached a point where you need to change things to get back on the path to progression. The human body loves homeostasis (read: staying the same), and if you continually provide the same types of stimulation—i.e., exercises, sets and reps—your physique will undoubtedly stagnate.
So you cannot become complacent in the gym. You will not gain muscle with a whisper—only with a scream. You must constantly seek out ways to provide a novel stress to your muscles to force overcompensation, which to a bodybuilder means increased strength and muscle growth.
Luckily, there are a plethora of highly effective ways to go about revitalizing a tired routine. One of the best methods of waking up muscles that are sleeping on the job is, well, being a little one-sided. Unilateral training, or training one limb or side of the body at a time, is an underused strategy that can greatly step up the intensity of your workouts and help you to push past plateaus.
There are several unique advantages to unilateral exercises that can help catapult your physique to new levels:
1) Increased concentration, as your mind and central nervous system are focused on one side of the body.
2) Enhanced fiber recruitment with each repetition.
3) A greater number of motor unit pools fatigued in the target muscle.
4) The evening out of strength imbalances that may exist between your right and left sides.
While each of those factors is extremely important, the fourth is, in my opinion, the most important. Strength imbalances can lead to injury as well as uneven development, negatively affecting your overall proportions and symmetry.
For example, if your right biceps is stronger than your left, whenever you do barbell curls, your right arm will dominate the movement from start to finish, greatly reducing the stimulation that the left biceps receives. If you keep training your arms that way, it will enhance the strength imbalance as well as cheat the left arm out of the stress necessary to facilitate optimum growth. With unilateral exercises, however, the weaker side will be forced to fend for itself rather than to simply go along for the ride while the more powerful side does most of the work.
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