Top Five Reasons to Place a Heavier Emphasis on Unilateral Lower Body Training.

Top 5 reasons to place a heavier emphasis on unilateral lower body training
 
A lot of buzz in training circles lately revolves around the subject of unilateral (or single leg) training.  There have even been debates broken out between which is better and whether you should do bilateral or unilateral training with athletes.  Like most training topics, the answer is that it depends on context and many factors.  We however, on a broad level, believe that the answer is both!
 
On top of simply doing these exercises, the training world has evolved in how these exercises are prescribed.  The common thinking is that main heavy movements consist of the big bilateral exercises(squats and deadlifts,) while single leg exercises are used for higher rep accessory movements.  While this method remains very effective, we can also use single leg exercises as our main heavy movements.
 
Before breaking down our main reasons for implementing this training style, let’s look at just a partial list of unilateral variations we use at our facility.
 

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Split Squats
Rear foot elevated split squats
Front foot elevated split squats
Reverse lunge
Walking lunge
Barbell lunge 
Hatfield rear foot elevated split squat
Single leg RDL with Dumbells
Single leg RDL with barbell
Split stance or kickstand RDL
Pistol box squat
Zercher pistol box squat
 
With this basic background, here are our top 5 reasons to implement heavy unilateral training into your program
 

1. Athletic performance- while squats and deadlifts still make up a heavy portion of our athletes training, we make sure they are strong on one and two feet!  Athletes will spend the majority of their time during competition on one foot, so it only makes sense to train this way.
2. Imbalance- not only athletes, but all humans alike will most likely develop lateral imbalances.  Most people can point to having a stronger side(left or right.)  while most of us will always have some degree of imbalance, minimizing it helps us reach our max performance potential and reduce risk of injury.  With bilateral exercises such as a squat, we rarely will exhibit a perfect 50/50 workload left to right.  The strong side takes the majority of the workload, even if you don’t physically feel the difference.  Isolating one side at a time forces one to use the muscles of one side entirely, and is the best way to close bilateral strength gaps.
3. Hip/knee instabilities-  a wide spread orthopedic issue that people deal with is knee pain that stems form weak muscles in the hip that create instability.   The most common of these chronically weak muscles is the glute Medius.  Putting oneself in a single leg stance increases the stability demand on that side and calls upon some of these muscles to work harder in isolation.
4. Spine deloading- it’s not news to anyone who trains that more weight can be lifted in a bilateral movement than that of a unilateral movement.  With most of our unilateral movements, we are either not loading the spine at all or significantly reducing the load.  However, we can still work at just as high of a relative intensity.  As an example, let’s compare a barbell back squat to a barbell reverse lunge.  In both cases, we can program to work up to a 5 rep max and will work just as hard in each, but will have a much lighter load on the spine in the case of reverse lunges. Implementing strategies like this are very beneficial to those with chronic low back tightness.  For those that can comfortably back squat, we still tend to work these types of movements in as the main lift from time to time to break up longer consistent periods of heavy spine loading while still lifting relatively heavy.
5. Coordination and motor control- When you work with a variety of different individuals in a gym, you learn a lot about individual differences.  We have had clients who can nail a good goblet squat and deadlift, but can hardly do a walking lunge without falling over in the beginning.  On the flip side, we have clients who are still learning to master the technicality of bilateral lifts but find the single leg exercises much easier to execute.  For these individuals, single leg lifts may be the go to moves to load and build strength while they work on technique of the bilateral lifts.