Q:  What can I do about disproportionate muscle growth between the different sides of my body? For instance, my right pecs, biceps and shoulders are bigger than the left – it’s all out of balance.

A:  Disproportionate muscle growth is actually quite a common problem. More often than not it’s a result of incorrect form. It’s usually the right side of the body that is the more developed (probably because most people are right handed). Beginning bodybuilders can easily slip into the bad habit of allowing their stronger side to take a disproportionate amount of the weight when doing barbell and even machine exercises. The result, of course, is that the side doing the most amount of work gets the most development and, just like that, your body is out of proportion with itself. So, the first thing to do is to get someone else to analyze your form and tell you if you are allowing one side to do more than it’s fair share of the work. If so, then you need to work at correcting this discrepancy. Consciously make your weaker side do its load of the lift and suppress the urge to have the stronger side overcompensate. Try substituting dumbbell exercises, which will force your weak side to take the full load. These things will hopefully prevent the problem from perpetuating itself in the future. But what can you do to correct the already existing problem?

To bring up your lagging sides, you need to incorporate unilateral movements into your routine. As a bodybuilder, of course, it’s out of the question that we’d consider bringing our over developed side down to be proportionate with the under developed side, so we don’t want to ignore that side. So we need to do a compound movement that will provide stimulation to both sides and then follow it up with a unilateral movement that targets the weak side. Do these exercises together as super sets. Here’s how a chest routine might look:

Bench press – 4 sets of 8-12 reps

Super Setted with

Unilateral dumbbell press  - 4 sets of 8-12 reps

For shoulders do the following:

Press behind neck – 4 sets of 8-12 reps

Super Setted with

Unilateral dumbbell press – 4 sets of 8-12

And try this for biceps:

Barbell curls – 4 sets of 8-12 reps

Super Setted with

Unilateral seated concentration curls