Exercises on both sides of my body?

This week's question

If I am only hurt on one side of my body, should I do my exercises on both? My answer - In most cases, yes absolutely! Outside of being immediately out of surgery, or an acute injury where your "exercises" are simply slowly moving the body part, it is helpful to do most "strengthening" type exercises on both sides of the body for a variety of reasons.

1. Neurological crossover - If you've ever watched Grey's Anatomy, or most any medical show, you may have seen this one. Working on one side of the body is actually shown to improve strength on the other side, even when the other side doesn't move at all! So if you need to improve strength on one side, working both sides will actually help that one side more than doing only the injured side.

2. Balance - we don't want the un-injured side to become the "weak" side, we want to make sure we are keeping up that strength

3. Injury prevention - in the absence of a true accident, it is likely there were some imbalances or movement pattern faults that led to the injury in the first place, lets try to correct those on both sides.

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