www.newellstrength.com
www.unlockingyourinnerstrength.com
The implications of this fact are many. First and foremost, if you are reading this, I am willing to go out
on a limb and say that at one time or another, you are going to have an ailment or injury. If you are
like most men, you are going to stop training until any sniff of pain is completely gone.
This is a HUGE mistake!
At Newell Strength, we Coach clients through injuries all the time. The best thing that you can do to
help heal from an injury is to move the body. When the body moves, lymph fluid is pumped
throughout the body. Synovial fluid ‘washes’ our joints and different hormones are able to cross the
brain-blood barrier which helps to produce many, many feel good chemicals and hormones (natural
pain killers if you will).
Sometimes. Check that; nearly all of the times, if you have gone to a doctor to inquire about your
injury, they are going to tell you to rest. Know that doctors will always err on the side of caution and
their recommendations for nearly everything are always geared at the average or as I like to call them,
the ‘Homer Simpsons’ of the world.
When we train unilaterally, meaning one limb at a time, there is a cross-over effect. Let’s suppose you
broke your right arm. By training the left arm, there will be a carry over of strength to the right arm.
This means that you when that cast comes off, you will have maintained some of the strength on that
side.
It also means that the muscle will not wither away completely. One of the biggest questions I get is,
‘Yeah, but if I train one side, won’t that make me unbalanced?’
No, it will not make you unbalanced. For some odd reason, people seem to think that just because
they are training one side of the body, all of the sudden, that side will grow enormous muscles, despite
the fact that the said person didn’t grow enormous muscles before.
By not training the un-injured side, you will become unbalanced. The nervous system works in a
systemic fashion, not a localized fashion.
Let me use an example from a non-injured client to make this stick to your brain like glue. If a client
came to me and said, ‘Kyle, I want to grow bigger arms. And by the way, so does my twin brother.’
So, we are clear that they have the same genetics, all other factors being equal, this would be a great
experiment. Now let’s say they are debating that they think they need more direct arm training such
as bicep curls and tricep pressdowns. I would have one of them do nothing but arm training for 6
months and the other one do nothing but deadlifts for 6 months.
Which one do you suppose would have the bigger set of arms at the end the 6 months? It would be
the that did the dead lifts. The global and system response to the dead lifts would be much greater
than just doing arms because of the stress applied to the body (and the weakest link philosophy) and
the hormonal response.