# tips for a balanced body please.



## carbonbloc (Jun 1, 2010)

Hi Guys, I started training 3-4 times a week over half a year ago. However, my left side is half the size of my right! shoulders, triceps and chest more importantly. My back is very strong and quite well balanced.

I am just going to detail a little as it is puzzling myself and a few guys I train with who are very experienced lifters.

While on bench press/ smith machine I have to drop the left side more to feel any pull/resistance as where my right side is alot bigger, it hinders the barbell to lower to an equal level. I tend to use db's more lately to try and equal out the size difference but nothing seems to be improving over the last few months. For the chest, shoulders and triceps I sometimes train solely on the left side, even cardio on a punchbag intense half hour or so to concentrate on my left, but still little improvement.

When I do my shoulders, even though my left is a lot smaller than the right the medials and prosterior heads never struggle to match my right side, its mainly the anterior that struggles? any ideas??

Just to add to the lopsided theme here, my left bicep again is alot smaller than the right yet my left bicep can lift more for longer, figure that one out, when I am right handed. Hopefully someone can shed some light or give me some tips as its driving me mad and will probably end up with me packing it in.

Thanks in advance!


----------



## SK-XO (Aug 6, 2009)

Tbh I found and probly most found when they first started things take longer then others to catch up, however after what 1.5/2 years training now I find everythings coming into "place" proportion. Everyone has slightly imbalances it's natural.

Train equally hard on both sides. And for example if one delt is slightly out of range then the other try emphasing on the weak side more.


----------



## dtlv (Jul 24, 2009)

carbonbloc said:


> When I do my shoulders, even though my left is a lot smaller than the right the medials and prosterior heads never struggle to match my right side, its mainly the anterior that struggles? any ideas??
> 
> Just to add to the lopsided theme here, my left bicep again is alot smaller than the right yet my left bicep can lift more for longer, figure that one out, when I am right handed. Hopefully someone can shed some light or give me some tips as its driving me mad and will probably end up with me packing it in.
> 
> Thanks in advance!


Had similar issues to this when i first started out, and I think quite a few people do. While the body isn't perfectly symmetrical anyway, I think the main cause when differences are exaggerated is down to non training activities and how you build up muscle fibres (particularly the slower twitch ones ) unevenly through them.

I played a fair bit of tennis as a kid and as a legacy of that when I started weights had a slightly larger right side of my upper body with most muscles groups on my right side being able to do an extra rep or two on medium-high rep sets (10-20) over the muscles of the left side, but would fail sooner on the right when lifting really heavy.

To me that suggests the tennis developed more slow twitch muscles in my right side...maybe years of doing things one way is what it's about for most people - school bag over same shoulder for five years, always picking heavy stuff up with the same arm (always [email protected] with the same hand, :lol: ).

Fortunately about a year of training pretty much evened things out, although had to work hard on form on exercises that were affected.


----------



## Acee (Jan 21, 2010)

Work on form, drop the weight if you have to.

Do reps slowly and properly so you are not lifting off balance, benching is the worst, lift evenly, its too easy to tilt weights holding the majority of weight on your good hand and just lifting up your bad hand with less weight on it.

Good Form always and you will balance out


----------



## PHHead (Aug 20, 2008)

Acee said:


> Work on form, drop the weight if you have to.
> 
> Do reps slowly and properly so you are not lifting off balance, benching is the worst, lift evenly, its too easy to tilt weights holding the majority of weight on your good hand and just lifting up your bad hand with less weight on it.
> 
> Good Form always and you will balance out


This is good advice as I have been struggling with a pec imbalance for over a year now and nothing really helped but recently I have dropped my lifts quite dramatically and started really concentrating on form and getting that perfect slow rep ever time and it seems to have helped............you do need to bare in mind though that some imbalances are simply genetic and you may only be able to even them up so far!


----------

