Building Your Own Gym - The Essentials: Car/RV Living Edition

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Welcome to Part 4 of the "Building Your Own Gym" Series. This series will focus on the top 5 items I believe are best for creating your own "gym" based on your individual situation. As the title indicates, part 4 in this series is focused on best equipping the fitness needs of those living their best lives on the road, in their own cars or RVs (or any other vehicular device).  1.  Kettlebells: Incredibly versatile, a kettlebell is an absolute game-changer for your fitness if you love to travel and are living out of your RV or car. Living in your car/RV necessitates that you take maximal advantage of your space.  Kettlebells take up very little space and are extremely fun for training.  Buying one kettlebell will absolutely suffice for your nomad training. A single kettlebell will allow you to do any unilateral pressing and rowing movements for building your upper body, while also allowing for kettlebell swings, goblet squats, cleans, and snatches for training your l...
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Unilateral Leg Exercises: Why You Should Do Them

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     Unilateral Leg (Single Leg exercises) are excellent exercises for an individual to perform for a variety of reasons:

1. Unilateral Leg exercises promote core stability

2. They allow for less loading on the joints and connective tissue while still delivering a similar stimulus to the muscle that would be provided by a bilateral exercise (ex: back squat)

3. They allow for loading primarily on the desired leg muscle rather than accumulating systemic fatigue throughout the entire body and other indirect muscles. (Ex: a bilateral barbell back squat will accumulate a large amount of fatigue in the leg muscles, but also in the lower back, traps, shoulders, etc. versus a dumbbell lunge which will primarily accumulate fatigue only in the lower body leg muscles.

4. Unilateral Leg exercises are more transferrable to sports and athletics where athletes are almost always primarily generating the majority of force from a single leg (think of a sprinter running down a track, or a basketball player laying up a basket).

5. Unilateral Leg exercises can be great ways to work the legs around nagging injuries. Where an individual might have a lower back injury or an upper-body injury that necessitates they do not perform a heavy barbell squat or deadlift, the variety of single-leg exercises allows the individual to work their leg muscles in a way that they can avoid excessively loading these injured muscles and possibly incurring the risk of injuring them further and worse.

6. Unilateral Leg exercises are excellent exercises for correcting imbalances in the lower body muscles. By human nature, individuals have a lateral side that they will favor. One side of the body will often be stronger than the other. Unilateral exercises - upper or lower body - can help correct muscular imbalances and protect against potential injuries down the road.


    While unilateral leg exercises should never replace your bilateral leg work of barbell squat, deadlift, and hip thruster variations, they do certainly have the place in everyone's training program, whether to improve sports performance, fix muscular imbalances, work around nagging injuries, or maybe just to introduce some new exercises to your program and make training more fun.

Looking to build up your home gym? Check out my favorite fitness equipment manufacturers, Kettlebell Kings and Rogue Fitness for all your fitness needs!


Comments

  1. The Daily GrindMarch 3, 2021 at 9:03 PM

    Have a specific Unilateral Leg Exercise that you enjoy doing? List it in the comments!

    ReplyDelete

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