Reagan McKinney from Fayetteville Athletic Club shows us several of these exerices in your Workout Wednesday.

 

First by definition, a unilateral exercise is one that is done with or on one limb versus your one that is done with or on one limb versus your bilateral exercises which are to to us both limbs. So when you are doing those bilateral exercises a lot of times you can trick yourself into thinking that you are symmetrical that you are evenly balanced so one of the benefits of doing unilateral exercises is you are not able to that so called cheat so you are forces to strengthen each side equally um and symmetrically.

 

For example, if I am doing a single arm military press, I am going to push with one arm and then switch to the other side and push with one arm. So I am forced to strengthen each side equally. The second benefit is while I am doing that military press lets say I am doing the right arm. My left side has to be completely stable so I am actively engaging my core and strengthening my core so you get a huge core benefit.

 

Third when you are doing single arm or unilateral exercises um you are recruiting more muscle fibers to the workout so to push an object to point A to point B if you were to use one arm versus both arms that arm is going to be using more muscle so while your workout is going to still be bilateral exercises you want to start to sprinkle in some of those unilateral exercises and see if you can’t get some strength gains and some benefits from just a small change in your workout. 

 

Click on the video box to see this week’s Workout Wednesday report.