Bodybuilding Q&A on Disproportionate Muscle Growth

When the brain sends muscles the signal to contract, typically one side of the body gets that signal better than the other. This is an interesting phenomenon in the sense that though you can be right-handed, maybe you get better muscle contraction in your left arm (though usually right-handed people get better contraction on their right hand). However, though this may be the case for the left arm, your right calf may contract better than the left one when trained. Over time, this leads to strength imbalances and disproportionate muscle growth if not corrected through unilateral training (training one side of the body at a time).

Typically, this happens more frequently in beginners as their muscles are just beginning to create more efficient neural connections between the muscles and the brain and just learning how to process these signals. However, it can happen to advanced athletes too if they practice bodybuilding poses using only one side of the body (like doing a side chest for instance with the right side all of the time or just flexing a right arm when showing a muscle). This unilateral posing also causes the body to create more efficient connections between the brain and the muscle, thus creating disproportionate growth.

In this Bodybuilding Q&A on Disproportionate Muscle Growth, I discuss how beginners can prevent this from happening to them and also offer a couple of sample routines (one for chest and one for shoulders) that show how to incorporate unilateral training to your routine.