Unilateral Training on Inside Lacrosse

-February 1st, 2012-

Yesterday InsideLacrosse.com posted a GREAT Fitness article.

It was about Unilateral Training and it’s importance to the sport of lacrosse. I have long preached the importance of Unilateral Training, specifically mentioning it in my article Train Movements, Not Muscles.

Unilateral Training is basically single arm or single leg training. Meaning instead of squats or bench press you’d perform Single Leg Squats or Dumbbell Bench Press so each limb is doing it’s own work independent of the other.

The reasoning behind this is we all have a dominant side, and by training the limbs together the dominant side will always do a majority of the work, leaving you with a muscle imbalance.

Some key points from the article:

• lacrosse, like most sports, is a game where things rarely happen in a symmetrical fashion. Meaning that you’ll seldom have two feet planted firmly into the ground applying even pressure, or attempt to stick check an opponent by firing both arms out at the same speed and trajectory
• start doing more unilateral exercises (where the focus is more on one limb at a time) so that in addition to increasing strength, you could also work on improving things like balance, coordination and dynamic flexibility
• The other great thing about unilateral training is that its an excellent way to help detect strength and flexibility imbalances

You can check out the full article here. The author, Mike Mejia, is a well known Strength Coach and will be writing future articles as well. I couldn’t be happier that someone else is going to preaching proper training for Lacrosse.

P.S. If you want to see how I include Unilateral Training into a program enter your email on the right for NLL MVP Dan Dawson’s Strength Program!

Tags: IL Fitness, Inside Lacrosse, mike mejia, unilateral training