I have searched both for articles and forum posts here. I have seen some with uneven appearance, but that’s, not my question. I am not a newbie lifter. Yes, gear. My form is good. I am making improvements to the point that the weight feels light in my right hand, but a hard lift for the left. This is not just chest, but that whole side of my body. I have tried extra reps on left, negatives on left to no avail. I had a very serious accident a few years ago. I know that the brain plays a roll in strength (beyond mental preparation). I did have some head trauma etc.
I would like to know if anyone has seen this, or experienced it. If so, please tell me about you’re outcome. If not, I will still take and constructive advice.
I have a quite severe leg length discrepancy (not anatomical) that has presented quite a set of challenges on my strength career. I also sustained a pretty nasty injury to my right leg in 2014 that resulted in me not being able to use my right leg for about a month, and only gaining 100% back after about 4-5 months.
These two issues surfaced a plethora of weaknesses and imbalances that I cope with daily. One of the things I’ve done is steeped myself in understanding anatomy and biomechanics (I am in school for PT, but even before I was very curious); this, coupled with literal incessant trial and error with training and prehabilitation, has given me the ability to understand how to maximize hypertrophy and strength capacity in most settings. Given, it’s not perfect…far from it. It’s a learning process.
Since you’ve provided vague information, it’s too hard to give a direct answer, but as far as training either which side, I’d advise not doing more reps, but simply not training one side at all on a given exercise. If your issue is neurological and dealing with the brain or spine, it’s out of my wheelhouse and everything I said is probably meaningless lol.
I’ve always been right side dominant due to being right-handed I guess, and my left bicep has always been 1/2" smaller. A few months ago I started trying to concentrate on the left more. Like for alternate dumbbell curls, or any alternate side exercise, I would start with my left arm. Also, while looking in the mirror on any exercise I would try to focus on the left muscle being worked. Then when the gym closed I started working out at home. In the spare room I work out in I put up a mirror and the ceiling light is to the left of me so when I looked in the mirror my right side is kind of shaded but my left side I can see the muscles and veins working so I tended to focus primarily on the left. And even on exercises where I can’t see myself in a mirror I tend to just tilt my vision to the left side. Now, after months of this, I’m having the opposite problem of not feeling the exercise on my right side as much. And I started concentrating on my upper chest about the same time and I swear I’ve got a little more development there on my upper left pec.So if you happen to be one side dominant you can definitely retrain your brain.
I had a shoulder situation, one side was painful and weaker than the other. For awhile I pressed two different weight dumbbells because one side was so off. That didn’t really work.
When I figured out what was wrong (shoulder impingement) and worked on it I had improvement.