Unilateral training is a term you will hear me as a trainer or coach refer to a good bit here at Apex. The reason unilateral training is so often used here because all sports are played on one leg at a time! Pause and take a moment, picture an athlete sprinting, jumping, cutting, throwing, kicking in a game type setting. Notice anything in common? Most of the time these movements start or finish on only one leg not two at a time. The only time an athete is standing on two feet that I can think of is golf, even in baseball after contact is made with the ball there is a sprint and even in basketball it is a rarity that an athlete can take off from two feet at a time to elevate.
Because we have all now come to the same conclusion, now we have to identify how to train appropriately. So while there are times we have atheltes doing plenty of movements off of two feet, it will be just as often if not more that we train them unilaterally or on one leg at a time. We can achieve this through a series of jumping drills and strength training drills done daily, as well as helping with coordination through footwork and balance drills that are encorporated into our training. When an athlete goes through our testing assessments here, we also analyze results on each leg seperately painting a clear picture for us which leg is more dominant and by how much. These results allow us to see a few things one being what we need to improve upon and also an athletes likelyhood of injury. There is a strong correlation especially in female athletes that the more balance we can create between each leg in regards to strength and power, the less likely we are to see them experience a serious injury!
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