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Making do with one arm. My PT told me about a well-documented phenomenon called contralateral strength training effect. When you do resistance training on one side, the other side also becomes stronger (about half the gain).

63,115 views • 2 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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You become injured. ⠀ ⠀ You’re placed in a cast, or sling. ⠀ ⠀ You are told to not train upper body, and just build the lower half, or vice versa. ⠀ ⠀ You don’t even bother training your non-injured, non-dominant (in most baseball, upper extremity related cases) side, because why would you need to? ⠀ ⠀ Here’s why you should absolutely train your non-injured side, even if your injured side is immobilized. ⠀ ⠀ Cross education (CE) occurs after unilateral training where performance of the untrained, contralateral (in this case injured) limb is enhanced.⠀ ⠀ Increased neural drive originating from the “untrained” motor cortex contributes to the cross education effect.⠀ ⠀ A few studies have shown that CE can preserve or spare strength and decrease atrophy on the untrained, injured limb. ⠀ ⠀ In most baseball related cases, injuries of the upper extremity most often tend to be on the dominant side. Chances are there is already some sort of imbalance in strength and or hypertrophy between sides. It is also likely that when rehabbing from that injury, we tend to attend less and be less detailed with the non-injured, non-dominant side. So the chances of there being an imbalance post-injury are likely. It’s the reason why players get hurt, rehab, come back, and in some cases end up injuring the contralateral side shortly thereafter. (Of course we see that more with lower extremity injuries.) ⠀ ⠀ In a study conducted by Justin W. Andrushko and co. They took 16 participants who were immobilized with a cast, and assigned them to a 4-week resistance training forearm program on the non-injured limb. Here’s what they found ⬇️ “The nondominant forearm of 16 participants was immobilized with a cast, and participants were randomly assigned to a resistance training (eccentric wrist flexion, 3 times/week) or control group for 4 weeks. Pre- and post testing involved wrist flexors and extensors eccentric, concentric and isometric maximal voluntary contractions (via dynamometer), muscle thickness (via ultrasound), and forearm muscle cross-sectional area (MCSA; via peripheral quantitative computed tomography). Only the training group showed strength preservation across all contractions in the wrist flexors of the immobilized limb (training: −2.4% vs. control: −21.6%; P = 0.04), and increased wrist flexors strength of the nonimmobilized limb (training: 30.8% vs. control: −7.4%; P = 0.04). Immobilized arm MCSA was preserved for the training group only (training: 1.3% vs. control: −2.3%; P = 0.01). Muscle thickness differed between groups for the immobilized (training: 2.8% vs. control: −3.2%; P = 0.01) and nonimmobilized wrist flexors (training: 7.1% vs. control: −3.7%; P = 0.02). Strength preservation was nonspecific to contraction type (P = 0.69, η2p = 0.03) yet specific to the trained flexors muscle. These findings suggest that eccentric training of the nonimmobilized limb can preserve size of the immobilized contralateral homologous muscle and strength across multiple contraction types.”

Ryan Aguirre, CSCS

79,627 views • 3 years ago