Single Leg Training: 8 Reasons to Go Heavy

If you have ever been told to train sagittal before frontal plane, to keep your main lifts bilateral, or that you can't get stronger with unilateral loading because it's too unstable, I'd love to offer another way of looking at it.

I often program blocks of heavy unilateral work, and when I come back to my bilateral lifts, they're stronger than if I had kept going after only bilateral work. I see the same thing with the people I coach, so I want to walk you through why I think that happens.

Every movement is triplanar. Even a bilateral squat asks for relative motion between the pelvis, hips, and spine, and the two sides of our body rarely operate or position themselves the same way. Sometimes that means a bilateral lift puts more pressure into areas we don't want, or we end up loading one side more than the other without realizing it. Often that's the right side, because of our internal rightward pull and cortical dominance.

Force is shared, or force is demanded

When you lift bilaterally, force is shared between both legs. In split stance and single leg work, force is demanded. One hip has to create extension while the other is flexing, the pelvis has to stay level, and the trunk has to resist rotation and side bending. That isn't just balance. It's force control.

As load increases, the nervous system has to coordinate the foot, the hip, the pelvis, and the rib cage as one unit. When the system can't manage that load yet, the body finds another option. You might see a hip hike, a pelvic shift, or the spine stealing motion from somewhere else. Those aren't failures. The body is showing you where it needs more support to accept and transfer force.

Going heavy here trains frontal plane control, transverse plane stability, and true hip loading without the body having to work around a limitation. It builds strength right where symmetry tends to break down. It also shifts the question from how much force you can produce to how well you can accept it, transfer it, and redirect it.

Bilateral lifts show capacity. Unilateral lifts reveal control. Heavy unilateral lifts build both.

8 reasons to train heavy single leg

Here are a few situations where a block of heavy unilateral work can serve your training well.

1. You have strength imbalances from shifting over to one side more often. If one side tends to take more of the load in your squat or deadlift, bilateral training can keep reinforcing that pattern. Single leg work gives each side its own job, so the side that has been doing less gets a chance to build strength of its own.
2. You have mobility deficits in different ranges of hip flexion on each side. It's common for one hip to access deeper flexion than the other, or for each side to run into its limit at a different point in the range. Training one leg at a time lets you work within the range each hip has available today, rather than letting one side set the depth for both.
3. You want to prioritize less load on the trunk with more stimulus to each leg. A heavy bilateral squat asks your spine and trunk to hold the entire load. When you train one leg at a time, each leg still gets a strong training stimulus with less total weight running through your back.
4. You want to challenge stability at the hip, knee, and ankle. With a narrower base of support, the hip, knee, and ankle have to organize together to control the descent and drive back up. That's the kind of stability you rely on when you land, cut, or change direction.
5. You want to remain athletic and powerful outside the gym. Running, jumping, climbing stairs, and most sports happen one leg at a time. Strength you build on a single leg tends to carry over more directly to the way you move in the rest of your life.
6. You are having pelvic floor symptoms with bilateral lifts. Alterations to the length tension relationships around the pelvis can show up as leaking, heaviness, or pressure during heavier bilateral lifts. Single leg work changes how load and pressure move through the pelvis, which makes it a really great option if you're managing prolapse or incontinence and still want to train heavy.
7. Your SI joint and low back feel better when each side of the hip and pelvis can rotate independently. Each side of the pelvis moves a little differently as you walk, run, and lift. Unilateral work allows more rotation at each hip and each side of the pelvis on its own, which can take pressure off an SI joint or low back that has been managing both sides at once.
8. You manage pressure differently on each side. Most of us don't organize pressure the same way on the left and right. A heavy load helps you compress down into the ground more easily, so you can sense the difference between sides and start to work with it.

One option to try: the single leg sit to stand

A heavy single leg sit to stand to a box is one of my favorite ways to start loading one leg at a time. You can adjust your range of motion by changing the height of the box, and the box helps you keep a more balanced center of mass with less hip hiking.

You can absolutely change how you hold the weight, too. A goblet hold, a back squat, or a safety bar squat can all work, depending on which position suits your body best right now.

If you'd like to see more of what heavy single leg training can look like, I break down a few more ideas in this video.

Bilateral, unilateral, and everything in between

None of this means giving up your squats and deadlifts. Bilateral lifts still have an important place, and I train them too. The goal is to give your body more options, so that when you come back to your bilateral lifts, both sides have more to contribute.

That's how we train inside the Empowered Fitness Membership. The programming includes bilateral lifts, unilateral lifts, and everything that supports them, from breath and pressure to joint health and conditioning, so you're building strength and control together. You also get coaching and a community of people who are curious about the same questions you are, so you aren't working through it on your own.

If you'd like programming that brings all of these concepts into your training, I'd love to have you join us.

Join the Empowered Fitness Membership

If you're not sure whether it's the right fit for where you are, email me at [email protected] and we can figure out the best place for you to start.