SHAPING YOUR LOWER BODY - BENEFITS OF UNILATERAL MOVEMENTS

Squats, deadlifts, leg press; these are all great compound exercises that are really effective in building strength and conditioning your lower body, but how often do you mix in one legged movements to your workout?

Unilateral or single leg movements are often overlooked yet are something that should be incorporated into your workouts to help improve your strength, balance and composition of the lower body.

I am a big lover of unilateral movements. They add a challenging component and help to identify which side of your body may be more dominant vs requiring a little more strengthening.

If you are looking to change up your leg routine, feel you’ve hit a bit of a plateau with your strength or fitness results, or have adapted to your current training program, I highly recommend incorporating some unilateral exercises.

Unilateral movements are fantastic for:

• Increasing your strength – that one leg has nowhere to hide and can’t rely on its buddy to help it out of the exercise. All of the focus is on the one leg at a time. When coupled with a healthy diet it can assist in improving muscle tone and shape due to the recruitment and activation of various muscle fibres.

• Improving your balance – standing on one leg can be challenging at the best of times. When you add movement into that or some added resistance it will really challenge both your balance and posture, leading to:

• Improved core strength and stability – your core muscles need to work harder and remain activated to assist in balance throughout the movements, resulting in a stronger core.

• Assists with muscle activation and recruitment – performing unilateral movement’s force you to focus on the specific muscle groups you want to recruit to successfully complete the exercise. This helps build that mind-muscle connection and activate muscle fibres that might normally go unnoticed when performing a normal squat or deadlift.

• Some of my favourite single legged exercises for shaping and toning the lower body are:

  • Bulgarian split squat

  • Any lunge variation - back stepping lunges, walking, side, elevated, plyo.

  • Single leg hamstring curl

  • Single legged press

  • Single legged deadlift

  • Single leg squat

  • Pistol squat

  As with all movement form is a priority to help avoid injury. Those with lower back or hip pain or instability should start slowly with these movements, and if pregnant single leg exercise can increase or aggravate pelvic girdle pain. Generally speaking I would recommend most pregnant clients to avoid exercises that bear weight on one leg anytime from 16wks and beyond - but every pregnancy is different.

  Be sure to start with body weight or light resistance. Some of the above exercises also really challenge your balance so are great at assisting to improve this and your proprioception. To make them more challenging keep the tempo to a 1:3 or 3:1 ratio or even super slow, add in some bottom half pulses or isometric holds to really feel the burn.

  Here is an example mini circuit to elevate the heart rate and target the lower body to really feel the burn the following day:

  40s on, 20s off of the following movements. Repeat for 3 rounds.

  • Step ups

  • Single leg deadlift R

  • Single leg deadlift L

  • Rower or Bike

  • Walking lunges

  OR add 1-2 of these exercises into your next leg routine, or perform a circuit of 3-4 of them on a regular basis to help see some changes to that lower body.

  Brooke x