Living on One Leg

Are you a professional broad jumper? No? Perfect!

If you aren’t, then most of your life happens on one leg at a time. You’re walking around, not hopping, after all, right? Grocery shopping, kicking soccer balls, throwing a baseball, and even punching happens one foot at a time.

Why am I pointing this out?

Well, we’ve purposely spent a considerable amount of time working on one leg at a time in the gym this month. Variations of lunges, pistol skill work, and volume pistol training have been sprinkled into to our training with performance in mind. Now, of course, two legged movements like the back squat, front, squat, deadlift, clean, and press are just as important as ever. The functionality of unilateral movements, however, is worth developing.

All sorts of cool things come into play beyond “real life” application with this stuff, too. Unilateral loading (or posting your whole body on one-sided/legged support) like that found in the pistol, for example, bring wonderful things like rotation into play, especially when compared to more balance bilateral loading (or posting your whole body evenly on both sides/legs). In addition, working with one side at a time can expose weaknesses in the system and regularly unseen errors from the hip, knee, and ankle.

Have you found discrepancies in your movement while working on one leg?

 

Logan Gelbrich

@functionalcoach