Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - The Easy Way to Find and Fix Muscle Imbalances

Episode Date: September 26, 2018

Let’s face it. One of the biggest reasons to toil away in the gym is to look good. Really good. Most of us guys want a big, broad upper body, bulging biceps, washboard abs, and a thick, strong lower half. Gals usually want lean legs, a curvy butt, and a toned upper body and abs. If you listen to the right people, you’ll discover that getting there isn’t all that hard, really. Get your calories and macros right, follow a well-designed workout program, take the right supplements (or not), and just put in the work, and you’ll gain muscle and lose fat each and every week. Unfortunately, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll wind up with the exact body that you want. In time, you might notice that one side of your chest is slightly smaller than the other, or one arm is clearly larger than the other, or one thigh is more developed than its counterpart. What to do? Many people say this can’t even happen if you’re training properly. Many others say it’s purely genetic, and that you have to just play with the cards that you’re dealt. Well, both are wrong. You can develop muscle imbalances following any weightlifting routine, good and bad, and you can absolutely take measures to correct them. It’s pretty simple, too. You don’t have to drastically change your training or buy special equipment. As you’ll see in this podcast, all you have to do is make some simple tweaks to your training routine, keep an eye on how your body responds, and adjust accordingly. And by the end, you’re going to know exactly what to do to fix YOUR muscle imbalances. Let’s get to it. 4:36 - What is a muscle imbalance? 8:20 - What causes muscle imbalances? 15:00 - How do you spot a muscle imbalance? 16:34 - How do you prevent muscle imbalances? 21:24 - How do you fix muscle asymmetry? 25:03 - How do you fix muscle disproportion? Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

If you train one muscle or muscle group more frequently or intensely than its physiological or visual counterpart, a muscle imbalance will develop sooner or later. Hey, Mike here from Muscle for Life and Legion Athletics, and welcome to another episode of the Muscle for Life podcast. This one is going to be about muscle imbalances. So if one side or part of your body is bigger or stronger than the other, that's a muscle imbalance, right? And in this podcast, we are going to talk about how to fix it. So let's start by admitting to ourselves that one of the biggest reasons to toil away in the gym is to look good, to look really good. For us guys, most of us want a big,

broad upper body. We want bulging biceps, washboard abs, and a thick, strong lower half. And most gals, they want lean legs. They want a curvy butt. They want a toned upper body and flat stomach. If you listen to the right people, you will discover that getting there isn't really all that hard. If you get your calories and you get your macros right, and you at least pay attention to your nutrition and do that halfway decently, if you follow a well-designed workout program and take the right supplements or not, either way, it doesn't make that big of a difference, and just put in the work and stay patient, you will gain muscle and lose fat each and every week. You will gain muscle and lose fat each and every week, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you will wind up with the exact body that you want. the other, or one arm is clearly larger than the other, or one thigh is more developed or defined than the other. And what do you do when this is the case? Well, many people say this can't even

happen if you are training properly. Many others say that it's genetic and you just kind of have to play with the cards that you have been dealt. And both of these camps are wrong. You can develop muscle imbalances following any weightlifting or resistance training routine, no matter how good or bad it is. And you absolutely can take measures to correct them. And correcting them is not all that complicated. It's actually pretty simple. You don't have to drastically change your training or buy special equipment. As you're going to learn in this podcast, all you have to do is make some simple tweaks to your training routine and then keep an eye on how your body responds and adjust accordingly. And by the end of this podcast, you're going to know exactly what to do

to fix your muscle imbalances. This is where I would normally plug a sponsor to pay the bills, but I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead, I'm just going to quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically my one-on-one coaching service. So the long story short here is this is the personal coaching service that I wish

I had when I started in the gym many years ago. Every diet and training program that we create for clients is 100% custom. We provide daily workout logs and do weekly accountability calls. Our clients get priority email service and discounts on supplements, and the list goes on and on. Furthermore, my team and I have also worked with hundreds of people of all ages, circumstances, and needs and goals. So no matter how tricky you might think your situation is, I promise you we can figure out how to get you results. If I have piqued your interest and you want to learn more, then head on over to www.muscleforlife.com forward slash coaching and schedule your free consultation call now. I'll tell you, there's usually a wait list and new slots fill up very quickly. So if you're

interested at all, don't wait, go schedule your call now. Alrighty, that is enough shameless plugging for now, at least let's get to the show. All right. So as usual, let's start with the basics. What is a muscle imbalance exactly? Now, every major muscle in your body has a twin. Left pec, right pec, left quad, right quad, left triceps, right triceps, left lat, right lat, and so on. Therefore, a muscle imbalance is a size and or strength discrepancy between two matching muscle groups. For example, it's common for guys to have one arm or pec that's larger than the other. Bodybuilders refer to this as asymmetry, a lack of symmetry. Now, sometimes you can see these imbalances in the mirror and sometimes you can't, but you do often notice them

in your training. You'll notice that one limb is stronger on a certain exercise than the other. For example, you might notice that one side of the bar tends to ascend faster than the other when you are bench pressing or when you are squatting. And when that's the case, it may be due to one or more muscle imbalances on the trailing side. Now, another type of muscle imbalance exists between pairs of major muscle groups, like your chest and back, your triceps and biceps, and your upper legs and calves. Bodybuilders call this disproportion. Now, if any of these opposing pairs of muscle groups are significantly smaller or weaker and less developed than the other, visual symmetry and performance suffers, and in some cases, muscles, which not only knocks their aesthetics,

but it also can increase the likelihood of hurting their shoulders. So as far as muscle building and strength gaining goes, the goal really is twofold. One, we want symmetrical looking muscles on each side of our bodies. And two, we want proportionate development of the upper and lower and front and back parts of our bodies. Now, fortunately, 80% of doing those things is just following a well-designed workout program that focuses on heavy barbell training and that doesn't neglect or undertrain any portion of your body. The other 20%, however, is going to depend on your genetics. We all have natural, strong, and weak points that will show more and more in time as we become more and more advanced in our training, and eventually these things will need to be addressed. For my

part, for example, my chest and biceps have always been high responders to training while my lats and calves have always been stubborn low responders. And these days, actually, I've also noticed, and this is something I'm addressing, my right leg is, my right quads in particular, are developing faster than my left. And this is mostly due to, I think, I mean, I'm right-handed. And when I was younger playing kickball and stuff as a kid, I kick with my right leg. I just do everything with my right. And so I think that has translated over the years into unconsciously favoring my right side a little bit, particularly with heavy squatting and on the hardest reps, you know, the last few of those hard sets where I will just tend to put a little bit

more of my weight on my right side and make it work a little bit harder. So now I have to address that in the way that we're going to discuss in this podcast. Now, before we get to fixes, let's talk a little bit more about what causes muscle imbalances. Now, the we get to fixes, let's talk a little bit more about what causes muscle imbalances. Now, the most common cause is very simple. It's just training one muscle or one muscle group more or more intensely than another. This is obvious, of course. If you train one muscle or muscle group more frequently or intensely than its physiological or visual counterpart, a muscle imbalance will develop sooner or later. For instance, if you do more reps on your dumbbell curls with your strong arm than

your weak arm, it's going to, in time, it's going to wind up noticeably bigger and stronger. Similarly, if you hit your chest with 100 heavy reps per week and you're back with only 30, or if you focus all of your time on your upper body and neglect your lower body, you are going to wind up with a disproportionate physique. And these types of scenarios usually just boil down to poor workout programming. Many workout programs for men tend to emphasize the beach or overemphasize, I should say, the beach muscles, you know, the chest, shoulders, and arms, and then more or less neglect the rest. There's usually a little bit of back training in there, a little bit of pulling, and then very little legs, if any. And for women, it's usually a tremendous amount of lower body volume and lower

body work and very little volume and work for the upper body. A well-designed workout program, however, should distribute the total work, the total volume fairly evenly between the upper and lower regions of the body and between pressing, pulling, and squatting. Now, of course, most guys are more interested in developing their upper bodies than their lower bodies and quite frankly are going to be happy with their lower bodies a lot sooner than their upper bodies than their lower bodies and quite frankly are going to be happy with their lower bodies a lot sooner than their upper bodies. It just takes a lot less work to build a solid set of legs than it does a solid chest by most guys standards. So programs for men often can emphasize the upper body a bit more than the lower body,

but shouldn't be so heavily weighted toward the upper body a bit more than the lower body, but shouldn't be so heavily weighted toward the upper body that the lower body just obviously is being neglected and obviously falls behind in progress. And on the female side of things, it's more or less the same thing, just reversed. I understand that most women want to focus on their lower bodies more than their upper bodies, but that doesn't mean that they should really be doing no upper body work or very little upper body work or very low intensity upper body work. If we wanted to express this numerically, I guess we could say that it can make sense to have a 60-40 type of split in terms of emphasis, right? So for guys, it can make sense to put 60%

of their work into their upper bodies and 40% into the lower bodies or maybe even a little bit, maybe even 65-35. And for women, it would be, you know, 60 to 65% of the work going to the lower body and the remaining going into the upper body. That can make sense. But if you're getting into like an 80-20 type of situation or even worse, muscle imbalances will occur. Now, another common problem is accidentally using one side of your body more than the other on various exercises like the squat, deadlift, and overhead press. This is what I mentioned earlier has, I think, happened to me with my right side of my body and my right leg in particular. I think it has done a bit more work over the years, primarily from squatting and deadlifting than the left. And now I have to

correct that. And for many people, what happens is they're just not focused on the work at hand when they are training and their mind is wandering and they're kind of just going through the motions and this prevents the mind muscle connection that many bodybuilders talk about, which does have some legitimacy, especially for just maintaining proper form and trying to make sure that you are not favoring one side of your body more than the other on a bilateral exercise, like a barbell, anything really barbell squat, deadlift, bench press, overhead press, and so forth. And then what happens is one side of the body, the stronger side, usually tends to just

do more work than the other. Again, it's unconscious and it happens easily if you're not paying attention. So for example, let's say your left back muscles are less developed than your right. And you don't realize it, but when you are doing, let's say barbell rows, your right side is pulling a bit harder and generating more force and more power than your left side. And again, you play this out over time and that's why your right side of your back is going to be more developed than your left. And you know, this actually can be an issue with unilateral exercises as well. So for example, let's say we're dealing with the back situation that I just mentioned.

And of course, you don't realize it, but when you're doing dumbbell rows with your left arm, your lesser developed side, you tend to use more shoulders and more momentum to swing the weight up than you do with the right side where your form is stricter and therefore you are better targeting the back muscles. And because of this, every time you dumbbell row, the right side of your back just gets a bit more work, a bit more high quality reps than your left side and grows bigger and stronger faster. Another situation, another common situation is poor flexibility and mobility, which then prevents people from doing exercises properly, even if they wanted to. Many of us, of course, spend our days sitting or hunched over a desk, which makes it easy to develop tight

shoulders, tight hips, tight lower backs. And that can get in the way of what we need to do in the gym because our bodies automatically make various compensations, which we are not aware of, but which result often in certain muscles being over-engaged and others being under-engaged. Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. So if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it. It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say thank you. You can find me on

Instagram at Muscle for Life Fitness, Twitter at Muscle for Life, and Facebook at Muscle for Life Fitness. All right, so now let's talk about spotting muscle imbalances. How do you spot a muscle imbalance? Well, of course, the easiest type of imbalance to spot is asymmetry, where you have a mismatch between the left and the right side of certain muscle groups. So all you have to do is grab a measuring tape, for example, and measure both sides a few times, average the measurements, and then compare. I like to measure muscles flexed for this type of analysis because it results in more consistently accurate numbers simply because you are less likely to depress the muscles with the tape, which of course throws off your measurements. Now, proportions, on the other hand, are trickier to judge because it's at least partially subjective.

You know, I might look at someone and think that their biceps are too big for their shoulders, whereas someone else will think that looks awesome. And that said, if you take cold, unflexed pictures of the front and back sides of your body, backsides of your body. And if you analyze and scrutinize the relationships between your upper and lower halves and your front and back muscles, you'll probably find at least a few blemishes. We all have them. And this is especially true if you are currently training one side or one half of your body significantly harder or more than the other. And if that's the case, rest assured you have an imbalance to one degree or another. But again, the good news is you can fix it. It's not that big of a deal. Even better though is preventing muscle imbalances before they occur. So let's talk about that for a minute. The first step to preventing muscle imbalances is following a workout program that's built on compound exercises

and that trains your entire body fairly evenly. For instance, if you want to train your legs, you can do something like leg extensions, which work your quads, or you can squat, which work all of the muscles in your legs and engages just about every other muscle in your body as well. And the same goes for every major muscle group that you train. You can do an exercise that isolates it and doesn't train or develop anything else to any significant degree, or you can do an exercise that focuses on it, that emphasizes it, but also heavily involves and trains and develops other muscle groups as well. And the more you do of the latter, the more you do of those compound exercises, the more symmetrically your body is going to gain muscle and strength over time.

Unfortunately though, as I mentioned earlier, that doesn't mean that you aren't going to develop muscle imbalances. You absolutely can. First, you are going to inevitably favor one side of your body slightly more than the other in certain exercises. Even if you pay attention, it's going to happen at least a little bit. For example, you might extend one arm just a tad further during your bench press, or you might angle one foot a little bit more out than the other while squatting and deadlifting. And over time, these little quirks, these little habits can add up to slight, but significant, but noticeable differences in size and strength.

And this is one of the reasons why many weightlifting programs, many well-designed, time-proven weightlifting programs, include a lot of unilateral exercises. Now, unilateral exercises are movements that train both limbs simultaneously but independently, like the dumbbell lunge, dumbbell bench press, and dumbbell overhead press. These types of exercises negate the physiological biases that can creep into bilateral exercises, which are exercises where both limbs have to work together to perform the whole movement because these unilateral exercises force each limb to pull its own weight, so to speak. Another effective way to prevent muscle imbalances from developing in your body is to follow a simple but effective

mobility routine. If your body isn't flexible and functional enough to perform an exercise correctly, it's going to have to compensate to get the job done and compensations inevitably cause muscle imbalances. For example, in the past, I've struggled at times with tight hip flexor muscles. And when one side was tighter than the other, I couldn't help but slightly favor the looser side when squatting heavy. And as I've mentioned a couple times now, my right side of my lower body is a bit more developed than my left. And years ago when I was having hip flexor issues, I don't really have them much anymore. It was always on my left side. My left hip flexors would be tight. And when I would squat, this would inevitably lead to me

favoring my right side a little bit. And especially, again, when you get down to those last few reps as you are approaching technical failure, and it becomes harder to focus on the nuances of your technique because you're really just giving it your all to get the weight up regardless of how it comes up. Now, as far as mobility routines, I've tried many things over the years, ranging from traditional mobility exercises, band work, lacrosse ball stuff, you know, Kelly Starrett type stuff to yoga. And I've actually found that I enjoy yoga the most. And I have a little yoga routine that I run through every day. It takes me about 10 minutes.

I'm actually alternating between upper and lower body. And it's just a handful of yoga stretches that have really helped keep everything loose and functional. If you want to check it out, just head over to muscleforlife.com and search for yoga and you'll see an article I wrote on it. But the takeaway here is if you are currently not doing any stretching or mobility work, just 10 minutes a day really can make a big difference over time in terms of not only preventing muscle imbalances, but also preventing injury. And when I say injury, I don't necessarily even mean something drastic or acute, but even minor stuff. I've noticed since I've been doing this yoga routine, acute, but even minor stuff. I've noticed since I've been doing this yoga routine, I just have fewer aches and pains and strains. Things just tend to work better with my body, which is neat.

Okay, so let's move on. How to fix muscle imbalances. So if you currently have a muscle imbalance, you want to know how to fix it, the following information is going to be for you. So first, let's talk about fixing muscle asymmetries. This is where one side of your body is bigger or stronger than the other. And the solution here is pretty obvious, right? You have to train the weaker or the smaller side more so it can catch up. And the easiest way to do this is to simply increase the weekly volume, which can be defined in many ways. I like how Greg Knuckles defines it in terms of just hard sets, right? These are your muscle building sets. These are your working sets, your sets that you use heavy weights on and that you push to somewhere close

to technical failure, which is the point where you no longer can maintain proper form. Whereas muscle failure is where you can't keep the weight moving regardless of form, right? So if you can just increase the weekly hard sets on the weaker or smaller side, in time, it will catch up. And personally, what I like to do is I like to go up by three to four hard sets per week for the smaller or weaker side. So in my case, I have an imbalance between my right and left legs. So the solution is simple. I'm currently doing nine hard sets on bilateral exercises. So right now, my lower body day, my leg day is barbell back squat, and then I do leg press, and then I do lying hamstring curls for some extra hamstring work. And then in addition

to that, I'm doing three extra hard sets of split squats only for my left leg. Normally, if you're going to do a set of split squats, of course, one set consists of really it's one set for your right leg, one set for your left leg. Then you would consider that one full set of split squats. In this case, I'm doing three hard sets just for my left leg. So my left leg is getting that little bit of extra work. Another example of how you might do this is, let's say your left shoulder is smaller than your right shoulder. And you normally do, let's say six hard sets of side raises per week. Well, you could do an additional two, three, maybe even four sets of side raises per week

with your left arm only. And then once your left side has caught up with your right side, your left shoulder has caught up with your right shoulder, you could go back to what you're doing before. Another thing you can do to help correct muscle imbalances is to end your sets on unilateral exercises when your weaker side fails. So in the case of the

shoulder imbalance, for example, that would mean stopping your side lateral raises when your left side just can't do anymore, regardless of how much more your right might still have left in the tank. And the reason why this helps is it prevents you from accidentally racking up more volume. And in this case, we could say volume is more referring to reps, right? It helps prevent you from accidentally making your strong side just continue to do more and more work than your weak side. This way, you allow your weaker side to determine when you stop your sets, not your stronger side, which is, again, a way to equalize the volume. Okay, so that's it for asymmetries. Let's talk about muscle disproportion, which we recall is a situation where a muscle imbalance exists between pairs of major muscle groups. For example, chest and back, triceps and biceps, and upper legs and calves, or even thighs and hamstrings. Now at bottom, the solution here is more or less the same as the solutions we just discussed for asymmetry.

You have to train the lagging muscle groups more or more intensely than you are currently training them. And you can achieve this by increasing the weekly volume, right? The number of hard sets you're doing every week, or you can work with heavier weights and, you know, push harder for progressive overload. By way of example, let's say that your legs are still too small compared to your upper body, or even vice versa if you're a woman, and you've been following a well-balanced weightlifting routine, but this is what your body has given you from it. And maybe it's because you had neglected your legs or your upper body previously, or you allowed the dominant muscle group to get a

big head start, or maybe the lagging muscle group just didn't respond to the training as well as you had hoped. Either way, if you don't change anything about what you're doing, if you don't change your workout programming, you are probably going to be stuck with the imbalance for quite a while. So the solution here then, of course, is to train the lagging muscle group harder. And let's just say it's legs, right? So you got to train your legs harder, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to add another leg workout on top of what you are already doing. In fact, that might be too much for your body to handle depending on what else you're doing inside and outside of the gym,

really, which of course eventually can lead to symptoms related to overtraining, which just becomes counterproductive. So instead, what you will probably need to do is you're going to need to dial the rest of your training back a little bit to make some room, so to speak, some physiological room for the additional leg work. And that's especially true if you're doing a lot of heavy compound weightlifting, as you should be. And if you do this, what it will allow you to do is to focus on maximal leg development without sacrificing any of the size or strength that you've developed elsewhere in your body. And when you do this, you are creating what's called a specialization routine, right? So this would be a leg or lower body specialization routine. These types of routines are built to push the envelope with

one specific muscle group while cutting back a little bit with everything else so you can make sure that you are fully recovering from your training. Now, I've put together a number of specialization routines which you can find over at Muscle for Life, which is just muscleforlife.com, F-O-R-L-I-F-E.com. And if you head over there and you search for bigger and stronger, you'll see a number of articles that I've written, like how to get bigger and stronger legs in just 30 days, how to get bigger and stronger biceps in just 30 days, shoulders, back, chest, butt, and so forth. And if you check them out, you will see what I'm talking about. You'll see that whatever the focus muscle group is, it gets hammered while everything else is given enough time and attention

to kind of just maintain a holding pattern while we focus on developing whatever it is that we're focusing on. So the bottom line here on muscle imbalances is if you are going to be doing really any form of resistance training for the long haul, you're probably going to develop muscle imbalances to at least one degree or another. Whether due to workout programming, exercise technique, or genetics, it is inevitable. That said, you can mitigate this by focusing on heavy barbell training for the bulk of your weightlifting, by training your entire body fairly evenly, and by including some unilateral exercises in your workout routines. Then when imbalances appear, and they will even if you follow all the advice that I'm giving you, you can take simple actions to correct them. The most effective methods are making sure

that your dominant side isn't getting more volume than your weaker side. And then of course, by adding more volume or intensity to your lagging muscle groups. And if you do all that, you may develop muscle imbalances, but then you can fix them and you will never struggle with them, which again, it will not only improve your aesthetics, but it will also reduce your risk of injury as well. So it is well worth the time and energy. Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and don't mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you're listening from. This not only convinces people that they should check the show

out, it also increases its search visibility and thus helps more people find their way to me and learn how to build their best bodies ever too. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then just subscribe to the podcast and you won't miss out on any of the new goodies. Lastly, if you didn't like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at mike at muscleforlife.com and share your thoughts on how you think it could be better. I read everything myself and I'm always looking for constructive feedback, so please do reach out. All right, that's it. Thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon. And lastly, this episode is

brought to you by me. Seriously though, I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in, so instead I'm going to just quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically my one-on-one coaching service. So the long story short here is this is the personal coaching service that I wish I had when I started in the gym many years ago. Every diet and training program that we create for clients is 100% custom. We provide daily workout logs and do weekly accountability calls. Our clients get priority email service and discounts on supplements, and the list goes on and on. Furthermore, my team and I have also worked with hundreds of people of all ages, circumstances, and needs and goals. So no matter how tricky you might think

your situation is, I promise you we can figure out how to get you results. If I have piqued your interest and you want to learn more, then head on over to www.muscleforlife.com forward slash coaching and schedule your free consultation call now. I'll tell you, there's usually a wait list and new slots fill up very quickly. So if you're interested at all, don't wait. Go schedule your call now.