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Fitness: How to get stronger with unilateral upper body exercises
Summary
If you want to gain strength and build your muscles while ensuring you don't get injured, then you must try these upper body exercises
You could pick up a barbell and do some bicep curls, and follow that up with some dumbbell hammer curls, but that doesn’t mean you leave out the single-arm concentration curl. It will take twice the amount of time compared to choosing a third bicep exercise done with both hands, but spending that extra time is well worth it.
The first benefit, across the board, for all unilateral exercises is that your core will be more stable. When you use just one side, the body automatically engages the core to keep the other side steady. So apart from just working one arm or one shoulder or one side of the back, the core is constantly used.
The other big advantage is limb control. When you are doing single-side exercises, and in this case, using the upper body, and moving weights around the gym, you are doing so with one side of the body, allowing your mind-muscle connection to operate more efficiently.
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With all this in mind, here are four unilateral upper body exercises to add to your routine. Not only will they increase your strength and muscle growth in a balanced way, but they will also keep your training routine from going stale.
Archer pushups: The first one is not even a weighted exercise. This is an excellent starting point if you have mastered the conventional pushup, and has so many benefits that it’s a vital exercise to add to your list.
The first thing to know is that you are doing this move with the slight help of the other arm as well, so it might not be fully unilateral, but only one side of your body will be doing most of the work, while the other arm straightens out as you shift your weight to the working side.
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“When the pushing arm is very close to the body, [at an angle of] about 10-20 degrees, the target muscles are anterior deltoid & triceps brachii. When the angle is 30-70 degrees, the target muscle is the pectoralis major. Elbow position at 80-100 degrees from the torso can produce both acute and chronic injury to the joints and tissues. Be careful to stay in the safe zone," states a muscleandmotion.com article titled Archer Push-Ups: Advanced Push-up Variations. Fitness expert Michael Vazquez has a brilliant two minute video on how to do the archer push-up.
One-arm lateral pulldown: I saw this first time on legendary trainer Charles Glass’s Instagram page and have tried it on my last two back-and-bicep days. It is much more enjoyable than the conventional (and honestly boring) lateral pulldown and feels safer in terms of form.
I was doing another variation of the pulldown where the weight was in front, but the variation as shown in the video below is done while pulling the weight down from the side, following the angle of the back muscles.
Done on the lat pulldown machine by attaching a single-arm grip and taking a slight bend on the other side, resting on the thigh pads, this allows a longer stretch at the top of the exercise for higher engagement of the lat muscles. This cannot be achieved in the conventional pulldown move. It has also been noticed that using both hands in the basic move may see you work one side more than other. Using the same weights for both arms in this variation makes sure you are training both sides equally.
Single arm cable crossover: Done using either a resistance band or a cable machine, this move allows your bicep to be pressed into the pectoral muscles way past the point that the usual crossover move does. “The single-arm cable cross-over is an isolation movement that uses a cable stack to build bigger and stronger pectoral muscles.
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Working the chest one side at a time allows you to focus on the balance between the sides of your chest and really feel the chest muscles contracting," states a bodybuilding.com guide to doing the exercise. This is extremely easy to learn and the effect is instant. An absolute pec cruncher in the gym. If you want an added challenge to this, then try doing it with a rotation as shown below.
Single-arm shoulder raises: I can’t quite remember when I last used two hands for a shoulder press because this one is safer, let’s you lift heavier, and is easier on the back while taking fewer reps to hit hypertrophy. The first big advantage, and this is easier to appreciate as you grow older, is that it allows you to stack your shoulder joint in a safe position. Follow the video below to learn this.
I wrote about this in an earlier Lounge article titled, 4 Shoulder Exercises To Build Strength And Avoid Injuries. A Colossus Fitness video on the exercise also states that because the body is not “inhibited by the bar, you can focus on a full range of motion". This allows the dumbbell to be stacked safely on the shoulder with the elbow pointing slightly ahead to save this joint a lot of trouble. One might not be able to go beyond a few reps of 15-20kgs on each side, but those are also really good numbers on this particular exercise.
Pulasta Dhar is a football commentator, podcaster and writer.
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