INJURED? THINK YOU CAN'T WORK OUT...? THINK AGAIN!
CONTRALATERAL STRENGTH TRAINING EFFECT
CONTRALATERAL STRENGTH TRAINING EFFECT
How many times have you been moving and found that you tweaked something? Maybe you pulled your hamstring, felt a twinge in your shoulder, or even worse you really damaged something and ended up having surgery or in sling or brace. A normal response would be to say, “Oh well, guess I’m injured and need to take it easy. Looks like I won’t get to move.” Then we stay home, find something on Netflix to binge, and grab our favorite snack to fill the cracks of our broken heart. That right there is the ultimate momentum killer.
What if I told you it didn’t have to be this way? Just because we get injured, doesn’t mean we have to stop moving. It’s an opportunity to figure out why it happened, get manual therapy, do some corrective exercise, and come back with a better foundation. Just because your arm is in that sling or you have that brace on your knee doesn’t mean you can’t strengthen that limb.
That’s right folks! You can continue to strengthen your injured side by strengthening your uninjured side. Now before you call B.S. on me, there are a some really smart people out there (definitely smarter than me) who have studied this and have the hard data to back it up. Cue the boring statistics and hard data please. In a meta-analysis, systematic review (the highest level of evidence) performed by Carroll et al 2006, they looked at 16 randomly controlled tests that included a range of 15–48 training sessions. In these studies only one side of the body was subjected to resistance training. According to their review, they found that the strength of the opposite, or contralateral, side of the body increased by approximately 8% of its initial strength, or about half the strength increase of the trained side. Now, there are a whole lot of neurological reasons why this works, but the bottom line is this: if you cant use one of your limbs to move and exercise you can train the other side and still gain some strength.
This has huge benefits, particularly when it comes to physical therapy and return to activity. At Polaris PT & Wellness, our goal is to keep you moving and give you as much freedom as we possibly can while you’re being treated, instead of shutting you down. We believe that if you aren’t moving, you aren’t really living. Comment below and let us know what you think.
-Dr. Brig Woods PT, DPT, OCS
Contralateral effects of unilateral strength training: evidence and possible mechanisms Timothy J. Carroll, Robert D. Herbert, Joanne Munn, Michael Lee, Simon C. Gandevia Journal of Applied Physiology Published 1 November 2006 Vol. 101 no. 5, 1514-1522 DOI: 10.1152/japplphysiol.00531.2006