Welcome back to Lift Like A Titan, Anon! I hope your hands are calloused and clothes soaked from your training. Today I have a great guide to make your body look better and stronger than before.
Last week we covered how your lower body training can be improved significantly simply by moving in ALL directions with a resistance applied. If you haven’t read that post you can check it out here.
Today we are going to play along with that theme of improving training by focusing on fixing your muscular and strength imbalances.
When you are moving heavy weights on your compound lifts, severe strength imbalances have a CHANCE for injury. And there’s also the annoying feeling of some of your muscles being smaller than others.
I want you to lift in the safest and most effective ways.
Let us begin!
How Muscle & Strength Imbalances are Caused
If you are right or left handed, that side of your upper body is probably stronger and more developed than the other side. If you use one leg more than the other during a sport such as soccer, football, basketball than that leg is probably bigger and stronger as well. That’s just how muscles adapt to different loads over time.
But that’s perfectly okay! It is impractical to think that we can always load each side of the body equally 100% of the time everyday of our lives. Our lives are made up of situations that might need us to do many of the same movement patterns over and over to make a living. Plus it is way more common for people to be only right or left handed instead of both so imbalances are going to happen either way.
But the degree to how imbalanced is up to you to control.
I’m right handed so the right size of my upper body is more dominant than my left. My left Lat, Pec, Bicep & Tricep, Shoulder, Forearm are all slightly smaller/weaker than the right. My left leg is slightly weaker than my right leg probably because of years of using my right leg for sports.
I know that feeling of feeling imperfect you have when you compare your biceps very well. But I am here with solutions to help make that feeling go away
Those patterns are adapted by your muscles leading to imbalances out of necessity. See, your body is one of the most fine tuned machines in the history of the universe. When it senses its environment is forcing some parts of the body to work harder than others it will make those parts stronger so you can continue surviving.
Imagine if muscles only make adaptations if the load was perfectly spread across opposing parts of the body. We would of never made it to become Homo Sapiens if that happened.
We would still be like the creature below or something crazy like a mushroom.
There are multiple factors that can lead to these imbalances. Some common ones are:
-Poor Posture
-Weight Distribution during walking, running, standing, sitting and jumping
-Injuries that immobilize limbs for months/years
-Repeated movements that use only one limb
-Nerve damage
-Lack of mobility in Joints/Muscles
The biggest thing to understand is working out in the gym an hour a day is NOT ENOUGH to correct these imbalances. That is because the gym is most likely not the cause. Your pains while lifting weights are most likely SYMPTONS of imbalances, not the cause.
So I want you to find the times in your day where you are CONSISTENTLY using only one limb, one side of your body or putting all your weight into one foot/leg.
If you sit for hours a day, try a standing desk or learn to sit correctly. In the industrial/ heavy machinery industry where you probably are doing the same repeated movement every day; try doing whatever your are doing on the other limb or side of your body.
This is going to take courage and patience to fix the root causes because this didn’t happen over the course of a few days. So do not expect to correct it in a week or two.
How To Fix These Imbalances
Just in the US the average adults sits for 6.5 hours day. (LINK) And its even HIGHER for children? Sitting for this long is one of the reasons you probably have shoulder pains. Shoulder pains are some the most common injuries (LINK) in America .
To help get a life of free shoulder pain all you need is a resistance band (LINK) and this exercise. The exercise is called a band pull apart. However instead of having your arms only moving horizontally, I want you to start with the band over your head and pulling apart until the band is horizontal across your chest. And grip the band with and underhand grip instead of the overhand grip you see in the picture below.
You should do all this because you will strengthen the external rotators in the rotator cuff. These are commonly weak in people AND especially if you spend many hours sitting at a desk.
To find out in depth how to live free of shoulder pain click this link to my post.
Sets and reps for this? I want you to treat each rep as if your life depends on it. (It kind of does) So every rep should be done SLOWLY and with MEANING. The quality of these reps matter not the number so much. String as many as high quality reps before your form completely craps out on itself. Do 2-3 sets when you wake up and before you go to sleep.
Muscle imbalances can hide themselves very well on compounds movements because multiple joints and many muscles are being used.
Then these larger muscles have to pick up the slack the weaker muscles can’t, leading to those larger muscles getting even larger while the weaker ones stay the same or lose size and strength.
To combat this we need to use exercises and equipment that exposes these weak muscles. This is done through exercises that force each limb to work independently. So dumbbells/ kettlebells/ bands and the cable machine can be used instead of a barbell.
A barbell will always require two hands for whatever exercise you do. Using both hands and arms hides the imbalances in each arm and around the body as the weight is shared easily across both arms.
To continue with exercises that fix muscle & strength, here are the best ones I have personally used in my training when my imbalances were massive:
The Single Arm Cable Row
If you have one Lat bigger and stronger than the other this exercise will expose which. It done through only using one arm instead of two like during a barbell row. During the barbell row, one arm and Lat can take over most of the movement making the imbalance even worse.
By rowing with the cable at the top to down and pulling to behind your back you are getting one of the best stretches and contractions for the Lats Go heavy on this but use proper form of the row. Your focus should be quality reps on the weaker/smaller side.
Progressive overload over time on the weaker side will balance out the imbalance
The Bulgarian Spilt Squat
Got a weaker leg from a sports injury or a gym related injury? Dumbbell Bulgarian Split Squats force you to squat all your bodyweight and some more on one leg. There is no help from your other leg in lifting the weight up.
You want to go heavy on these and focus on quality reps on your weaker/smaller leg. The metabolic stress that is created from this is HUGE and will lead to leg gains because I bet you rarely feel as if your entire leg from ass to calf is on fire. This exercise does just that.
Dumbbell Incline Bench Press
You probably already do this exercise since its so popular in the gym. Then you have to be doing it in the least effective way possible if you still are suffering from an imbalance in your pecs and shoulders while doing this for years.
But seriously to get the most out of this exercise the correct bench angle matters a TON. It will make the difference of this being a normal flat bench press or a straight shoulder press. You know at this point that the pecs and shoulders work together best to bring the arms up and across the body. So the proper angle will allow us to lift the most weight with the arms ISOLATED from each other unlike on a barbell bench press. That is how you fix the imbalance in pec & shoulder size and the strength imbalance in pressing.
The strength built here can carry over to all your other pressing like barbell bench press & overhead pressing.
Laying Dumbbell Tricep Extension
If you are a young male in your very early 20s you probably have an arm imbalance. It might be from being a quarterback, pitcher, basketball player or a porn addiction. We all have a similar problem when it comes to our arms.
Since the tricep makes up almost 2/3 of the arm we should place a lot of focus on growing it and strengthening it. The position of the dumbbell going behind the head during the eccentric part of the exercise gets a HUGE stretch in the long head of the tricep leading to better gains. The bigger the stretch the more muscle fibers are being used and damaged = more gains.
The best way to do these is instead of having the arms straight up then lowering the weights push your arms back so they slightly more parallel to the ground THEN lower the weights and extend your arms. This is because it keeps more tension on the tricep since you are working against gravity way more than having your arms straight up.
You can summarize all of lifting into how can we place the most tension on our muscles against gravity and increase that tension over time?
Now you do it with dumbbells instead of an EZ curl bar or barbell because we want each tricep to carry its own weight. That is the theme of this entire post. Whenever you can get weaker muscles, joints and limbs to work independently with the best positioning,
Single Leg Dumbbell RDL
Bulgarian Split Squats solve a lot of leg problems but not all. One would feel that they should solve all problems considering how much effort they need to do.
That is where Single Leg Dumbbell RDLs come in. These focus on hip extension but on one leg so one hamstring will used at a time. Your hamstring in split squats aren’t doing much other than being a stabilizer because the hamstring is contracting and being stretched at the same time since knee flexion and hip flexion happen at the same time.
If you feel when extending your hips during a squat or deadlift that one side is lagging behind the other, this is the exercise you want to do to fix that imbalance. If you cant balance on one leg you can just simply lift the other leg slightly off the ground since its not being used to put all the tension on the working leg.
You want to go heavy as you can with proper form for fewer reps to really force that weaker/smaller hamstring to start pulling its own weight
Single Arm Dumbbell Row
We got vertical pulling for the Lats and this is the horizontal pulling. We are trying to force the weaker Lat to pull its own weight by getting the arm behind the back to get the strongest contraction and stretch in the eccentric.
The best cue I have for you is to row the weight to your HIP not just straight up. If you do it straight up you’re gonna feel it way more in your bicep and rear shoulder instead of the Lat.
Don’t be a pussy to go heavy on these. Your Lats are the biggest muscle on your back for a reason. The gains you will make on the weaker side will make all the effort worth it.
Single Leg Calf raises
Of course I saved the best for last just for you Anon. You probably don’t have a calf imbalance exactly unless you had your leg in a cast for 6+ months. You calves are just not as built in proportion to the rest of your muscles on your body.
This move gets you gains in both calves. It does this by putting all your body weight on one leg AND getting the best stretch on the calf. Your calves are constantly sharing your bodyweight when you walk/run/stand. Lets turn it completely upside down and make it do more work for more tension!
QUALITY REPS over quantity matter in this section more than any other section. If you are bouncing reps you are working your Achilles Tendon which is designed to be very fatigue resistant which means it will take lots of effort to tire out. But we want the calf to be doing the work. By going slowly down and back up we are forcing the calf to do that work.
Get something to put under your foot where you can get a stretch on the calf. Then get something to hold onto for balance with one hand. In the other hand should be a weight because the only way you are going to grow each calf is through weights that progressively overload the muscle overtime.
There are some other exercises I missed for like the Single arm cable chest fly, dumbbell tricep kickbacks and lateral raises and many more. All the ones I just mentioned are great for fixing muscular imbalances. They should be looked into and tested to see if your body anatomy responds well to them.
I hope your gains come quickly to fix those imbalances. I am here to guide you through any questions you might. Until next week. Titan Out.
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Nothing on this post is medical advice since I am not a doctor. Talk to your doctor before taking any actions. I am just a Titan who lifts a lot.
Good stuff man very informative!