Is Your Training Causing Muscle Imbalances?

You value your health and devote time and energy to ensure that your body is strong and active. This benefits your health on almost every level and places you at a much greater advantage health-wise than most of the population — only one-quarter of Americans meet the Physical Activity Guidelines for both aerobic and muscle-strengthening.

Given the effort you’re making to stay fit, you want to make sure that every lift and squat is working in your favor. Sometimes this isn’t the case when people train poorly, and it can lead to muscle imbalances that impact performance and lead to injury and pain.

As an expert in musculoskeletal injuries and sports medicine, Dr. Moisés Irizarry-Román encourages patients at No Mercy Sports Medicine to maximize their training. A great place to start is to make sure that you're not creating muscle imbalances.

How muscle imbalances develop

The vast network of muscles in your body often work in tandem — or oppositionally, as is often the case. For example, most muscle groups around your joints have opposing muscle groups; getting them to work together creates an ideal balance. 

You can also think of the muscles on one side of your body and their counterparts on the other side. In an ideal world, these muscles should be equal, but this is rarely the case.

Muscle imbalances can develop for a wide range of reasons, including:

• Relying too much on your dominant side
• Favoring one side because of injury
• Ignoring smaller muscle groups
• Poor structural mechanics
• Bad posture
• Prolonged positions, such as sitting or standing for long periods

Included on this list are poor training techniques that create, rather than remedy, muscle imbalances. For example, if you have a sore knee, you might favor it; when you squat, you engage your other knee more.

Or, perhaps you’re using the wrong form when you train. When you do that over time, it can lead to imbalances in your musculoskeletal structure that make you more vulnerable to overuse injuries.

These imbalances not only impact your training, but they can lead to myofascial pain syndrome, which affects about 85% of people at some point in their lives. This syndrome involves tight trigger points that pull on your fascia and lead to muscle tension, pain, and muscle imbalances.

Training for balance

Sports medicine specialists want people to focus on training smart rather than training hard. 

Dr. Irizarry-Román sits down with patients and reviews their training programs. Once he has an idea about what exercises you focus on, he first makes sure that you're doing them properly. Sometimes, even a slight adjustment in your foot position can transform an exercise from one that’s creating an imbalance into one that encourages balance.

He also reviews your biomechanics and performs a movement analysis that can help promote better balance in your body.

Another important aspect that sports medicine specialists cover is breath work and slow purposeful movements that really work all of the muscles. Many people who’ve trained over time tend to rush through their exercises, which can lead to sloppy form and muscle imbalances.

Dr. Irizarry-Román can add training exercises to your regimen to make sure you’re working all muscle groups — even the smallest ones — which allows your body to operate harmoniously. 

Better training, better balance

If you spend a little time working on better balancing your muscles, you’ll be rewarded with a body that performs well and is more resistant to injury.

To figure out how to best balance your muscle groups when you train, please contact No Mercy Sports Medicine in Miami, Florida, to schedule an appointment with Dr. Irizarry-Román. You can call 305-614-6757 or send a message online.