Hey, just read a mial from jumpusa. realyl interesting

Unilateral Training: One Side at a Time More than Doubles your Gains

Unilateral training - exercising one side of the body at a time - is a very effective training method often overlooked. Unilateral training creates more muscle involvement because of bilateral deficit. This means that the total weight you can lift with each limb working independently is greater than two limbs working together.

Example: The Leg Press. Adding up the weight you can lift with each leg will often be greater than the total weight you can lift with both legs. Because the weight you lift with both legs is less than each leg lifting a weight independently, you have a strength deficit.

Unilateral training also increases the strength of the inactive side. This is a little known fact of neurophysiology. If you do knee extensions with your right leg, your left leg gets a small training effect - without doing anything. Australian researchers found that that fast unilateral training had a greater effect on the untrained limb than slow training did. Unilateral training is a good change of pace, which may boost you to the next level of performance.

J Appl Physiol, 99:1880-1884, 2005

what do you all think about it? true? Is it more effective than doing two legs?

chao

lol.

But i always wondered, what they said about training one leg at a time, the other leg gets a small training effect. Is that method effective for vertical jumping?

well i read some where about training shooting in basketball with your left hand will have good effect on your right hand. I guess its some sort of coordination thing between your right and left hand which connects to your brain. I guess what they really are trying to say here is that by doing one leg at a time, will help improve the coordination of the non-working leg in doing that specific movement. Not sure though. just a thought

haha yeah thought so. I guess they maybe took the researh of how shooting with one hand will improve the other hand's shot a little, and use it on this. I dont know.

Just from a basic engineering focus, two supports acting together are actually stronger than 2 - single supports acting alone.  So, if one can hold 10 tons, 2 can hold 21 tons (for example). 

Now, single leg training can activate a lot more stabilizing muscles in the core and the rest of the body than normal lifts.  Since balance is usually the limiting factor, single leg training seems harder.  Next workout, see if you can dead lift 50% of your 1rm.

Or maybe not. We recently had an article about a guy telling us to stop training unilaterally (well not really, but you get the idea).

There's nothing to discuss, use your common sense, do them both, and shut up.

These are shocking discoveries. BRB, noting them down.

Sorry for bumping an old topic, but i find this very interesting.
Some things i would like to share:

- All motor activities are started from the brain, namely the primary motor cortex (M1). Parts of the body have different motor areas in the M1. Signals are sent from the M1 to the muscles. Each neuron in the M1 sends signals to a number of different muscles. You cannot control which signals of the neuron are transmitted and which are not, so the other muscles get activated too (in a lesser degree). The neuron can only be switched on or off. The number of activated neurons can vary though.

Most of the time, the neuron's signal does not cross the midline (so the neurons on the left part of the M1 take care of activity on the left part of the body) (it does cross but it crosses back so general effect= homolateral)
However, a small part of the signals goes to the othe side. Meaning that activity in eg the left leg will cause activity in the right leg as well to a small degree.

- As for the bilateral deficit, our professor taught us that there is also something as a bilateral benefit. If you only train bilateral activities, it will apparently make you stronger in the bilateral activities, but when counting up the unilateral activities, there is a deficit in this sum. His example was for example professional rowers and ski jumpers.