To Be or Not To Be...Single

Single…

I thought that I would write an article dealing with the difference between doing an exercise with one extremity or both, and what benefits or drawbacks we can by doing such exercises. I will first list some examples of exercises that I am talking about so you get the picture of what I am talking about:
-squat vs. single leg squat
-bench press vs. single arm DB press
-snatch vs. single arm snatch
Ok, I assume you get the point and can think of more exercise that you can manipulate to make a single leg/arm lift. These lifts have both benefits and drawbacks as far as your training goes. There are different ways to increase strength, and one of these is to decrease stability. That is exactly what is happening when you go from two to one leg. You have decreased your stability and intern increased the amount of muscle function that is required in the lone leg. This decrease in stability is exactly why I can not do a single leg squat with half of my full squat. Last Friday I had two athletes squat 400 for the first time, which is very impressive considering there body weights are 178 and 204, but I know neither one of them can do a true single leg squat with a 45 pound bar let alone half there max which would be 200.
So we will stick with the single leg squat (SLS) for a little bit. This is not the SLS where you have a leg on a box behind you; in the true SLS or pistol you only have one point of contact. With the version with the leg up behind you, you will not get the same transfer muscle function, because there has not been a drastic change of stability. By doing a SLS we are in a sense teaching the leg to function by itself, without the aid of the other leg. This should make sense to all athletes, since this is what happens very often in sports, you are required to change directions, jump, or sprint off of one leg.
Now let us turn to the upper body for a bit. When performing a DB press you are in fact using your arms separately, but they are still doing the same movement and typically at the same speed as each other. In basketball if you are guarding someone are both your hands doing the same thing? If so, it is rare. So what I will have athletes do is a DB press where only one DB is allowed to move at a time. So one will go all the way up and then back down, and come to a complete stop before the other one moves at all. You do not want to do the scissors motion where one is going up and the other is going down at the same time, when this happens we you are training momentum, not muscle. This movement is great for all athletes and helps with shoulder preservation. Another bonus, if you are like us and your weight room does not have DB's over 75, having your stronger guys do this will still help improve strength without having the bigger bells.
There are countless exercises that we can change to work our bodies in this way and if you need more please let me know, the key is that it must be a free weight movement to have a great effect. There needs to be a decrease in stability by only using one appendage. Doing a single leg, leg extension is not going to do anything worth while, more than a regular leg extension to help you athletically. Even with doing a leg press, there is nothing to stabilize, so reducing legs does not change the muscle activation for these exercises.
Through this training you are required to stabilize your appendages and they will function better independently. So why not do all movements like this? As I have said before everything has its place, but as you add something in, some other movement must come out. If all you did was single movements you would miss out on the increase in absolute muscular strength. In addition to this there would typically be a decrease in speed of the movement, depending on what lift you are doing. What I am trying to say is that there must be a balance, and the hard part is that it is different for everyone, and it is greatly effected by weak points. Again, if you have questions feel free to e-mail me tkolb@northernmichigansportsmed.com, I try to get to all e-mails within a day or two unless it becomes an article.