This is Your Quick Training Tip, a chance to learn how to work smarter in just a few moments so you can get right to your workout.
If you think about the stuff you carry in everyday life—groceries, luggage, hardware, beach gear, sports equipment—it’s almost never balanced evenly. One shopping bag is always heavier than the other. The “personal item” you bring on the plane is constantly just heavy enough to tug you in the wrong direction when you struggle to wedge your carry-on in the overhead compartment. Your kid unfailingly refuses to pull her own weight at the shore, forcing you to carry not only the cooler, folding chairs, and umbrella, but also several awkward buckets of beach toys across hundreds of feet of mercilessly hot sand.
In short, the physical loads we bear in the real world rarely mimic the perfectly symmetrical ones we regularly heft in the gym, and compensating for that in your training program can not only give you a leg up against nearly everyone else, but also help you build functional, real-world strength, which, for most people, is the only kind that really matters.
Any exercise that purposefully challenges your balance falls under the heading of instability training. Unilateral exercises are a perfect example—by training only one limb or side of your body at a time (think: half-bench single-arm press or single-leg deadlift), you prevent the stronger one from compensating for its weaker counterpart. The result is more balanced strength and a more even musculature.
Another highly-effective option that many guys never consider—if they’re even aware of it at all—is offset load training. The concept is simple: You load one side of a barbell or selectorized (adjustable) dumbbell with more weight, grip an evenly loaded barbell or dumbbell closer to one side than the other, or use a resistance band to unbalance what would otherwise be a stable load (e.g., by attaching the band to only one end of a barbell or by holding it firmly in the grip of only one dumbbell).
In so doing, you not only force the target muscles to work harder to compensate for the uneven load, but also engage an armada of stabilizing muscles that would otherwise cheer from the sidelines.
The result is more muscle—after all, the more you work, the more you build—and (just as important) a more capable and efficient neuromuscular network that enhances your performance both in the gym and beyond.
Your move: Weave offset training into your daily workouts such that every muscle or muscle group encounters it during the course of a week. On Monday, you might swap the traditional dumbbell curl and the classic split squat for the incline offset-thumb dumbbell curl and the offset split squat, for example. On Wednesday, you might switch things up by replacing the Romanian deadlift with the offset Romanian deadlift and the farmer’s carry with the offset load carry. You get the idea.
The point is to regularly challenge your balance by offsetting your load. The benefit will be not only making your muscles more symmetrical and powerful, but also an incredibly strong and chiseled core, because when you inject instability into your program, your core almost always bears an uneven share of the load.
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