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Episode 87: Inbetweenie - A Mythmas Special: 2 Strength Myths Busted image

Episode 87: Inbetweenie - A Mythmas Special: 2 Strength Myths Busted

S5 E87 · Movement Logic: Strong Opinions, Loosely Held
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In this in-between episode of the Movement Logic Podcast, Laurel discusses two major myths: the longevity significance of grip strength and the role of single leg exercises in improving balance. The discussion touches on the misinterpretations of grip strength's correlation with health and longevity, different types of grip and their training, and the genetic factors influencing grip strength. It also covers the efficacy of using gloves and straps. Additionally, the episode explores how single leg exercises contribute to overall strength and balance, challenging the notion that these exercises are essential for improving balance and athletic performance. 

00:00 Introduction to Mythmas Season

00:47 Debunking the Grip Strength Myth

04:49 Understanding Different Types of Grip

08:54 The Role of Genetics in Grip Strength

17:25 Exploring Single Leg Exercises

22:50 Benefits and Misconceptions of Unilateral Exercises

31:09 Conclusion and Free Mini Course Offer

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Stronger By Science: The Evidence-Based Guide to Grip Strength Training & Forearm Muscle Development

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Transcript

Introduction to Movement Logic Podcast

00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to the Movement Logic podcast with yoga teacher and strength coach Laurel Beaversdorf and physical therapist, Dr. Sarah Court. With over 30 years combined experience in the yoga, movement, and physical therapy worlds, we believe in strong opinions loosely held, which means we're not hyping outdated movement concepts. Instead, we're here with up to date and cutting edge tools, evidence, and ideas to help you as a mover and a teacher.

Debunking Strength Training Myths

00:00:41
Speaker
Welcome to this special holiday in-betweeny episode of the Movement Logic Podcast with me, your host, Laurel Beaversdorf. It is a Mythmas season, folks, and the only thing that makes this a holiday episode is that play on words. But really, truly, what better way to celebrate Mythmas than by merrily busting some common strength training myths that might be holding you back?
00:01:03
Speaker
So I heard a quote recently, something along the lines of, then I'm paraphrasing, the most expensive beliefs are the false ones. And I really liked it, and I think it's true, because say if you believe, for example, that strength training is dangerous, and because of that you avoid it, this could turn into a very expensive belief. Given what we know about strength training's reduction of incidences of injury and chronic disease,
00:01:29
Speaker
which can result in missed work and unfortunately for us in the United States, high medical bills.

The Grip Strength Misinterpretation

00:01:35
Speaker
In this episode, we'll look at two big myths and some smaller associated myths that aren't quite as expensive, but that could be limiting your ability to build strength efficiently and effectively as possible. First, we'll look at a common myth about grip strength, specifically how grip strength significance for health and longevity is often misinterpreted and misapplied in the context of strength training. We'll then talk in a bit more detail about grip, different types of grip and ways to improve grip strength. Next, we'll explore why improving balance in strength training doesn't depend on single leg exercises and why balance might not even be the most compelling reason to include single leg exercises in your routine.
00:02:21
Speaker
We'll also examine how single leg exercises are sometimes overvalued for certain benefits and underrated for others. Grab your favorite holiday drink, cozy up and let's unwrap and take a look at some of these myths. All right, starting with grip strength and common way the relationship between grip strength and longevity is misinterpreted. So let's start with a good reminder for all of us working in the health and fitness industry. Correlation does not equal causation.
00:02:48
Speaker
Just because two things are linked doesn't mean one caused the other. A classic example is the correlation between ice cream sales and drowning incidents. Both go up in the summer, but buying ice cream doesn't cause drownings. In the summertime, people are both swimming a lot and buying ice cream a lot.
00:03:05
Speaker
When interpreting health research around grip strength and longevity, it's always important to recognize when we start to want to assign causality to a relationship and try not to do that. So there's a relationship between ice cream sales and drowning incidences. Of course, we know ice cream doesn't cause drowning.
00:03:22
Speaker
Now maybe you know where I'm going with this as it pertains to grip strength, but if you don't, there is a common belief around grip strength that if you want to live longer, you should focus on strengthening your grip. The idea comes from the fact that many studies have found a correlation between people's grip strength and their overall health and longevity.
00:03:40
Speaker
Grip strength tends to predict someone's overall physical function and vitality. Some studies have shown that grip strength can even predict cardiovascular health better than blood pressure in certain cases, which is wild.
00:03:53
Speaker
But here's a critical catch. This relationship does not mean that increasing your grip strength will necessarily cause you to live longer, nor does it indicate that acquiring higher or lower levels of grip strength will cause changes to your overall muscular strength, your longevity, and mortality risk, your level of frailty and disability, your chronic disease risk,
00:04:15
Speaker
your cognitive decline, or your recovery and resilience, even though there is a relationship between grip strength and all of these conditions or outcomes. So before you ask Santa for some squeezers in your stocking so you can strengthen your grip and live longer, let's take a closer look at this misunderstanding.
00:04:32
Speaker
It is the case that grip strength does serve as an indirect marker of health. It's often a reflection of how physically active someone has been throughout their lifespan. People with higher levels of grip strength have usually engaged in more physical activity. And this is key, it's this physical activity that likely directly contributed to their better health outcomes and longevity among many other things like diet.
00:04:59
Speaker
genetics, access to health care, socioeconomic status, education, social support, and overall lifestyle choices, all of which play a role in shaping health outcomes in longevity. But the presence of a strong grip in and of itself is not what increases longevity. It's the behaviors associated with the acquisition of a strong grip.
00:05:23
Speaker
that do. These behaviors being more physical activity, more exercising are what actually support a longer life. So strengthening your grip alone isn't going to add years to your life just like buying ice cream will

Understanding Grip Strength and Training Tools

00:05:35
Speaker
not raise your risk of drowning. So let's talk in a bit more detail about grip.
00:05:39
Speaker
Here are three main types of grip strength. I learned about these three main types of grip strength on a great blog written by Cameron Gill on the Stronger by Science website called the Evidence-Based Guide to Grip Strength Training and Forearm Muscle Development. I will link that in the show notes. So there are three main types of grip, support grip, pinch grip, and crushing grip.
00:06:00
Speaker
Support grip is the most common way we perform grip in strength training. So think about how you wrap your fingers and thumb around the handle of a kettlebell for farmer's carries or pull-up bar for dead hangs or a barbell for the deadlift. That is called a support grip. But then we have something called a pinch grip. This is when you hold something between your thumb and fingers. And in strength training it's often a weight plate. There is this trend on social media, I don't know if you've seen it, for strength coaches who jokingly brag about being able to pinch grip heavy plates in one hand and carry them across the room. You know you've got a strong grip when you can pinch grip the 45 pound plate and carry it across the room. But you could think too about say there was a brick in your yard and how would you go over and pick up a brick off the ground? You wouldn't be able to use a support grip. You'd have to do a pinch grip. Why is there a brick in your yard? I don't know but you got to move it because you got to mow the grass.
00:06:54
Speaker
Using a pinch grip is probably what you do to juice one half of a lemon over top your fish fillet. Then we've got, last but not least, the crushing grip, which is the type of grip you demonstrate when you get that squeezer in your stocking from Santa.
00:07:10
Speaker
that contraption that is spring-resistant. You have to squeeze the handles closer together. This way of producing force through grip is the most common way grip strength is tested in research. When grip is measured in research, they use a machine called a dynamometer to test the force someone can generate with a crushing grip.
00:07:28
Speaker
In a real life context, this is the type of grip you demonstrate when you shake someone's hand and you want to make sure they don't leave that interaction thinking you have a weak handshake. And maybe instead they leave that interaction wondering if you're trying to break their hand. Have you ever shook someone's hand that you felt might be trying to break yours? All right so strength is specific.
00:07:49
Speaker
Specificity is a principle of strength training that is one of the four main principles of strength training right alongside progressive overload, something we should know about strength. Foundationally is that strength is specific. What does that mean? It means that if you train strength in one particular way, you are going to build your strength specifically in that way and not in other ways you are not training it.
00:08:13
Speaker
So it's not random. You're not going to randomly become strong because of an exercise you did. You will become strong in a very specific way according to the exercise and specifically how you train the exercise. So what this means is that if you train one type of grip strength, let's say it's the support grip doing deadlifts, this does not have a one-to-one transfer to your strength, say, in the crushing grip and vice versa. It's important to realize that, and I think it's interesting just to note that In research, GRIP is tested in a different way than it is applied in the context we are typically most engaged with in strength training. So the way it's tested is quite different than the way it's applied in real life, is all I'm trying to say. I'm really not drawing any conclusions based on that, I'm just pointing that out. So that said, there is likely some carryover between
00:09:03
Speaker
support grip strength that you build in strength training and then crushing grip strength that you test using a dynamometer. They're not entirely different. It's not like training your calves and expecting your biceps to get stronger. There's going to be some carryover, but it's valuable to know that they're different. And just something else that I think is interesting about these differences is that crushing grip, which is tested in research,
00:09:26
Speaker
ends up serving as this marker of overall health and vitality whereas the support grip is the thing we're progressively overloading in strength training that is the way our grip as well as our whole body is becoming stronger.
00:09:42
Speaker
Another important consideration in grip strength is the role that genetics play, and it's quite a large role. While grip strength can certainly be improved with training, it can be improved with progressive overload, it's largely influenced by genetic factors that include things like hand size and muscle fiber composition, as well as other factors that are mostly genetically determined. So this means that two people training their grip strength the same way,
00:10:07
Speaker
can see very different results, and this is true for all exercises. It's very individual. That's another principle of strength training, by the way, individuality. Something interesting I picked up on from the folks over at Barbell Medicine, which is a podcast I enjoy listening to, is that elite lifters often have a similar level of grip strength to non-elite lifters.
00:10:27
Speaker
It turns out that it's that elite lifters have less of a discrepancy between the grip strength of their dominant hand versus their non-dominant hand. I thought that was interesting. going Going back, genetics play a role in grip strength. However, you can still make significant improvement to it with consistent training. The women in bone density course typically experience this realization pretty early on that their grip is surprisingly weaker than they thought because they are now lifting a much heavier object. They're putting a more significant amount of weight through their hands and based on feedback we actually added some exercises that specifically target grip strength as bonus exercises they can do to enhance that particular aspect
00:11:14
Speaker
of their strength. In general, doing exercises like dead hangs as well as pull-ups, deadlift, rows, these are just a few examples of exercises that can improve grip strength. But you can also work specifically on grip in isolation, working on finger strength, wrist extension and reflection strength, elbow strength, because many of the muscles of grip are also elbow muscles and forearm muscles, pronation and supination strength through the forearm. Another interesting aspect of grip strength to consider is that grip strength varies depending on the size of the implement you're holding. So your grip can be stronger or weaker depending on the size of the implement, it follows an inverted U curve. So if we start talking about graphs, I don't want to lose you, it's not great podcasting material, but an inverted U. it' So flip a U, the letter U upside down, basically a hill that slopes downward on both sides. So there's an optimal diameter of a bar handle where you personally
00:12:17
Speaker
depending on your hand size, can generate the most amount of force through your grip muscles. That's the top of the hill. That's where your grip strength is the highest. But if the bar is too small or too large, your grip strength plummets, you won't be able to generate as much force because you simply won't have as much leverage. So this is one reason why barbells, the diameter of the bar, they're different.
00:12:37
Speaker
And it's often the way that this difference is described is that this is a men's bar and this is a women's bar. So women's hands tend to be smaller than men's, but not all women's hands are smaller than men's. So a women's bar may not be ideal for all women, nor are all men's hands larger than women's. So a men's bar might not be ideal for all men. The bar you select should really be based on your experience using that bar. So trying out different bar diameters is is a good bet.
00:13:03
Speaker
Unfortunately, a lot of commercial gyms only carry men's bars, but I think it's becoming more common to see women's bars included as well. These are usually Olympic barbells, by the way. We have a barbell equipment guide linked in the show notes for you. It's free if you want to grab that. It breaks down barbell equipment in a lot of detail. It is, after all, gift-giving season for many people.
00:13:26
Speaker
If you are looking to purchase barbells for yourself or anyone else, that would be an excellent guide for you to grab in the show notes. Something else that can help with grip as well are the addition of gloves and straps. Let's talk about gloves first. When you put gloves on to enhance your grip, you're typically working to enhance your grip comfort. Not necessarily your strength, although gloves can enhance strength in some cases. Maybe your hands are sweaty or slippery.
00:13:53
Speaker
For the most part, gloves keep your skin protected and prevent it from getting blisters. What gloves can also do is they can reduce tactile feedback from the bar or the implement, so that can sometimes actually decrease your grip strength and make it harder for you to hold on.
00:14:12
Speaker
I did quite a bit of CrossFit. I tried using something called Victory Grips and just really could not get the hang of them. While they did prevent my hands from getting ripped up from all of the gymnastics work on a bar, they weakened my grip too much to be able to hold onto the bar. I know quite a bit of folks who do kettlebelling enjoy wearing gloves to save their hands. But again, you're going to probably have a stronger grip without gloves.
00:14:40
Speaker
It's a trade-off situation on one hand the glove keeps your hands from getting ripped up but on the other hand it might weaken your grip some. The other thing about protecting your hands from getting ripped up is you're also preventing your hands from developing very useful calluses which will become a natural We often think about progressively overloading our muscles, but you can also progressively overload your skin. Going too hard too soon on skin looks like blisters. All right, so straps. There are also such a thing as straps that you can use typically often used in the deadlift and the Romanian deadlift. You can basically
00:15:17
Speaker
wrap a strap around your wrists. It's not tied, it's just wrapped a couple of times and helps to offload some of the weight of the bar into the strap instead of having to generate grip strength to hold onto the bar in the palm of your hand with your fingers.
00:15:32
Speaker
And so it doesn't completely offload the weight of the bar from your fingers and hand and grip muscles, but it goes a long way toward reducing the demand on those muscles so that you can instead find out how strong your posterior chain is, how strong your hamstrings, glutes and back are before your grip strength limits you.
00:15:53
Speaker
Folks in bone density course are finding out that actually it's their grip strength that is, in the beginning at least, the primary limiter to their ability to be as strong as possible in the sets. They'll have to stop because of their grip. It's actually okay if that happens in the beginning and it's okay for your grip to be the primary limiter.
00:16:13
Speaker
for some of the time and some of the exercises, but if it's always the primary limiter, that's where you want to look into reducing the demand on your grip straps can be a great way to do that in exercises like the deadlift and and and Romanian deadlift. Ideally, the posterior chain is the primary limiter to those exercises.

Integrating Grip Training in Overall Fitness

00:16:31
Speaker
This is a smaller myth around grip strength, which is that a lot of the time, I think the general attitude is that you should just suck it up and get your hands stronger so that you can participate without the cheat of gloves and straps, but if we find that our grip strength is often the primary limiter to our ability to hold on to a weight and we know that grip strength is largely genetic, we shouldn't just stop everything we're doing to make our grip stronger before we can progress in other exercises. We can simply use assistance when needed, whether that's finding a smaller diameter implement, maybe looking for kettlebells that don't have such a thick handle or getting a barbell
00:17:08
Speaker
with a smaller versus thicker diameter bar using straps and gloves, if appropriate. We don't just have to stop everything and and then only work on farmer carries, for example. And I could do a whole episode on farmer carries and how overrated they are as strength training exercises, in my opinion, but that is, of course, the topic of another episode. All right, to wrap it up, grip strength is important, but it's often misunderstood. It is a marker of health and strength, but not a standalone predictor. It's strongly influenced by genetics. It varies across different types of grips. It varies across the thickness or
00:17:44
Speaker
narrowness of the implement and it can certainly be trained. While grip strength training has its place, if you're actually looking to boost your health and longevity, don't just focus on grip strength and isolation. Grip is not special. It's part of well-rounded whole body strength, so train it as a part of well-rounded whole body strength. Choose equipment that matches your hand size and use gloves and straps strategically if needed.

The Role of Single-leg Exercises in Balance

00:18:10
Speaker
Time to unwrap our second myth. Let's talk single leg exercises. These are also referred to as unilateral lower body exercises. These are exercises like single leg deadlift variations, the Bulgarian split squat, the pistol squat or other single leg squats, step ups, lateral lunges, curtsy lunges, and reverse lunges. All right, there's this myth out there that we should do single leg exercises because they're going to make our balance better. The idea is that training on one leg at a time quote-unquote strengthens your balance. Seems legit, right? So here's where I should add that balance like grip is another
00:18:55
Speaker
indicator or marker of health and longevity, meaning there's also a relationship between balance and longevity. Just like grip, we cannot say that focusing exclusively on balance will contribute to improvements to our longevity because it's more about what having good balance says about someone's overall strength and mobility that is the real crux here.
00:19:17
Speaker
And here's the thing, lower body strength training especially improves balance. Just generally making your lower body stronger improves balance. So does mobility. There is benefit in working directly on balance, challenging balance with balancing exercises. For example, tree pose, light load, body weight, exercises, spending time on one foot or standing on an unstable surface. These types of exercises If we're only using these types of exercises as a means by which to challenge our balance, then we are going to be missing out on the foundational reasons there is even a relationship between balance and longevity, which is that balance indicates a higher level of strength and mobility. To my knowledge, there's no direct evidence that training balance alone will extend your life. Balance training is usually considered part of a broader fitness and health regimen rather than a standalone factor for longevity. I'm also not aware of evidence supporting mobility alone is enough either. Mobility isn't typically isolated.
00:20:23
Speaker
as a direct predictor of lifespan. But the thing about strength is that it confers so many abilities like mobility and balance. There is a mountain of evidence showing that strength is a direct influencer on health and longevity. Strength training has been shown to improve muscle mass, bone density, metabolic health, cardiovascular function, and overall physical function, all of which contribute to a longer, healthier life. Studies have found that higher levels of muscular strength are associated with a lower risk of mortality. So is it really true that single leg exercises function primarily to build balance?
00:21:01
Speaker
ah Oh, Mary Miss Santas here with some good news, because probably not. Why is that good news? The good news is that we have many more options beyond just single leg exercises, like bilateral exercises, too. Think squats and deadlifts. These can also help you achieve balanced benefits, like single leg exercises.
00:21:23
Speaker
And while it's true that single leg work can make your legs strong and challenge your balance in unique ways, they just aren't a must-have for balance. They also aren't a must-have for longevity or fall prevention. In fact, and this is a hard one to get through, I find to yoga students that are often the students who I'm strength training. Yoga students and maybe people who want to improve their balance tend to think that if in a strength exercise, that if they are wobbling around and having a hard time balancing, they think, oh, this exercise must really be helping my balance because it's challenging my balance. It's making me lose my balance. I find it hard to balance in this exercise. But here's the thing.
00:22:05
Speaker
If you are running up against the challenge of balance in a strength exercise, you are likely not building as much strength as you could be. If you were to instead stabilize the hell out of yourself in that unilateral lower body exercise, pulled onto a wall or a piece of furniture while doing it, the reason is that the less stable we make an exercise, the less strong we can make the prime movers of that exercise. There's too much co-contraction around the joint that inhibits engagement from the prime movers, making it so that those prime movers are unable to generate as much force as they would be able to if the exercise were made more stable. So if strength is the thing that gives us better balance directly in a unilateral lower body exercise, in order to improve our balance with it in the context of strength training, we should try to stabilize that single leg exercise so that ironically,
00:23:03
Speaker
our balance is challenged less so that our strength can be challenged and promoted more and we end up with better balance. It's counterintuitive until you understand the relationship between stability and strength.

Strength Training for Balance and Fall Prevention

00:23:18
Speaker
The best bet of all is to focus on strength training as a whole, particularly heavy strength training, and to work on strength in a variety of different lower body exercises, bilateral and unilateral, in order to achieve better balance and reduce your risk of falls, and that will certainly play a significant role in longevity.
00:23:37
Speaker
There are a couple more myths around unilateral lower body exercises. You might have heard the myth that unilateral lower body exercises are essential for athletic performance because they mimic sporting movements, many of which happen on one leg. And so many athletes and the people who train them incorporate single leg exercises believing that they need these exercises in order to mimic the mechanics of their sport for maximum performance in that sport.
00:24:00
Speaker
If I had a penny for how many times I've heard the expression, the adage, running takes place on one leg. Cool. But this whole belief is flawed. Strength exercises do not need to replicate sport-specific movements to be effective. In fact, if they do, they're probably much less effective. What's important for strength exercises in the preparation of athletes for their sport is that they help build the physical qualities or attributes that athlete needs, think power,
00:24:26
Speaker
strength, tendon stiffness, muscle endurance, tendon elasticity, things that are actually much more general capacities. And while unilateral exercises can be useful for enhancing single leg force production, they're not required to mimic sport mechanics because frankly, they don't. okay Lunges are a part of my strength training routine as a runner, but running is nothing like lunging, literally nothing.
00:24:49
Speaker
Training bilateral exercises like squats and deadlifts are also a part of my strength training routine as a runner and these can be and are just as effective in developing overall robustness for running. I also do plyometric exercises and other power-centric resistant exercises as these are more closely going to mimic the force production requirements for running than say heavy strength training would. Heavy strength training is not fast and bouncy.
00:25:15
Speaker
like running and like plyometrics are. Here's another one. It's commonly stated that unilateral exercises are great for core stability as they involve resisting rotational forces and maintaining balance. And while there is maybe a little bit more anti-rotation core involvement in unilateral exercises or more core involvement in general than in bilateral exercises, I think the effect is quite minor.
00:25:39
Speaker
Compared to if you instead did dedicated core training, ab roller type stuff with an ab wheel or a barbell, cable machine oblique exercise variations, v ups, hollow body holds, weighted leg raises, weighted side bends, dragon flags, ghd, sit-ups and back extensions. GHD stands for Glute Ham Development. You can Google that and see what that machine looks like. While you'll get incidental core work from a single leg exercise, I wouldn't recommend relying on those movements as your primary core training if you actually want to have a strong.
00:26:13
Speaker
Developed core so what are the real benefits of single leg exercises they're great for ensuring both legs are getting closer to equal work because there might be a tendency to favor one side in a squat maybe that's your stronger side they might help you to build up your weaker side to make it stronger without your stronger side taking over and that can definitely have benefits because it's just another way of getting stronger, right? Sometimes unilateral exercises are more conducive to building leg strength depending on if there's a discrepancy between strength on both sides in some specific way. Compared to bilateral exercises, unilateral exercises often place less total load through our system. We can't be as strong on one leg as we can on two, therefore we cannot
00:26:58
Speaker
place as much total load through our system on one leg as we can on two. This can have benefit in a rehab context. It can also have benefit for someone who just has limited access to weights. They don't have enough weight, so working unilaterally can make a change to your lower body strength. Another benefit of single-leg exercises is to help break through plateaus.
00:27:19
Speaker
You might be experiencing in bilateral exercises to introduce new movement patterns that provide a fresh stimulus to your body. Stepping away safe from the back squat to focus on lunging. Of course strength is specific so we know probably the most efficient way to get better at the back squat is to do the back squat but if we plateau to the back squat,
00:27:38
Speaker
it doesn't feel as good in our body because we've been doing it maybe for too long, step away from it, do some lunging variations, do some single leg work, and then come back to the back squats after that training block of doing some lunging and single leg work. And you might find actually that you're starting with a more developed strength profile through your lower body, suddenly the back squat feels better, your technique in the back squat is kind of starting from a place of better support so that you can now continue to make improvements in the back squat. Additionally, lower body exercise can be great for just preventing training boredom, which is real, right? So they just allow you to add this whole other category of lower body exercises that is new and fresh and interesting and prevents you from getting bored. Some single leg exercises for some joints can also be more forgiving in terms of range of motion. So I have a client who struggles with a bilateral hinge pattern. She ends up rounding her back a lot and we're working on it, but it ends up causing her back pain when she does this. But if I give her a single leg RDL, she performs that hinge pattern so much better and has no issue at all with that exercise in terms of her lower back. So suddenly now I can train her, strengthen a hinge pattern and it can feel good in her back.
00:28:46
Speaker
as opposed to taking hinge patterns completely off the table or having her do a hinge pattern that doesn't feel good in her body. Another example of that is some folks ankles don't have a whole lot of dorsiflexion available. So a bilateral squat can mean that they have to make up for whatever deficit they're experiencing their ankles from their hips. They end up pitching their trunk forward, getting super hingy in their squat that ends up placing too much load on their lower back and they hate squatting.
00:29:12
Speaker
And it's very frustrating. If we want to train their quads, we could give that person a lunge. Lunge variations, split squat variations are going to require much less ankle dorsiflexion. and still challenge the quads in a very meaningful way. Unilateral lower body exercises give us this whole other category of exercises that we can use to target similar muscle groups to their bilateral counterparts. And variety is a very good thing. In fact, variety is the fourth principle of strength training, right? We've got progressive overload, right? We must consistently keep the stimulus challenging to meet our rising strength. We've got specificity, strength is specific.
00:29:51
Speaker
We get out specifically what we put in. If we want to be strong in the back squat, best bet is to do the back squat, not the front squat. If we want to be strong in the underhand pull-up, best bet is to do underhand pull-up, not overhand pull-up. Strength is specific. and Strength is individual. We're going to have people who respond quickly to a certain exercise variation and people who respond slowly.
00:30:12
Speaker
We're gonna have people who are just genetically advantaged or disadvantaged in certain movements and certain movement patterns in terms of force production, depending on bone length and things like hand size, maybe even the shape of the ankle joint. Probably one of the best reasons to hire a personal trainer or to get some personalized coaching, which you get a lot of in bone density course, by the way, is to account for the individual limitations and needs that you personally carry as a person that aren't going to be met in a one-size-fits-all program. And then finally we have variety, right? Why is variety a principle of strength training? Because variety promotes well-rounded development of strength, of power,
00:30:53
Speaker
force production, it reduces the risk of injury so that we don't have overuse injuries from doing too repetitive of movement patterns. It can lead to our ability to get off of plateaus in terms of progress and essentially just keeps workouts mentally engaging so that we don't get bored. To go back to unilateral lower body exercises, why are they valuable? Well, they are not necessary for balance. We build balance by building strength and mobility. Bilateral exercises can do that as well.
00:31:23
Speaker
as unilateral exercises. They're not great for core engagement. You're much better off doing core exercises for that. But the best reasons you single leg work probably revolve around the variety that category introduces into lower body strength training. They can also in a rehab context reduce total load through the system, which can be a more accessible way for someone who is sensitive to load or needing to rehab a particular area of their body. And ultimately, they help us to be strong in more ways, to be strong in quote, as we say, all the ways.
00:31:56
Speaker
All right, I hope you enjoyed this in-tweeny on two strength myths that I wanted to debunk in today's episode. By the way, as a little Mythmas gift, we'd love for you to have our free bone density mini course, Barbell 101, which is also linked in the show notes. You can click on over there to grab your free copy.
00:32:19
Speaker
We basically teach you the ins and outs of barbell lingo, barbell equipment. By the way, the equipment guide is in that mini course, so you can just get two for one by clicking on the mini course. We teach you how to do three beneficial bilateral exercises, the squat, the deadlift, and the bench press. We also help you figure out how to build up those exercises using tools of strength training. So if you want to spend a little time over the holidays learning a little bit about barbells,
00:32:49
Speaker
definitely do that. You'll also be added to the wait list for bone density chorus lift for longevity which we are launching again in the spring. There's been quite a bit of demand so we're increasing the supply. You can head over to the show notes and get that free bone density mini chorus barbell 101. Alright, as always it helps us out. It helps us out. It really helps us out.
00:33:10
Speaker
if you can rate and review. Give us some stars, write us a little review. If, just to share your appreciation, to say, hey, I see you, Sarah and Laurel, I like what you're doing, it's helping me in some particular way, whether it be in your strength training journey, your journey as a movement teacher of some respect, we would love, love, love for you to give us a little love in return.
00:33:39
Speaker
We'll be back in your ear on January 1st with a ah very different type of episode, one that we haven't yet generated, but will generate for the new year, which I think you're going to love. Until then, we wish you ah happy holidays and a very happy new year. Goodbye.