Many of us females pull and pull and still don’t have a pull-up—it seems that no matter what we do our lats just don’t want to grow. And then we push our hearts out, but still can only do a couple of sad little push-ups.

In the age of becoming more and more gender-neutral, I still respect biology. And biology has shown me in a decade of coaching fitness that women have a harder time gaining upper body strength than men. End. Of. Story.

Many of us females pull and pull and still don’t have a pull-up—it seems that no matter what we do our lats just don’t want to grow. And then we push our hearts out, but still can only do a couple of sad little push-ups.

Below are three ways I have had success helping female clients gain more upper body strength beyond embarking on death by ring row programs or logging box push-ups until the cows come home.

Upper Body Strength Key 1: Tempo

Basically this just means slowing down movements. Learning how to read tempo is definitely beneficial here.

What this looks like in practice:

• Ring Rows @31×3

This means you’ll hold the rings at your chest for three seconds, lower for three seconds, pause for one second at the bottom and then pull as explosively as you’re able to.

You can add tempo to bodyweight movements like ring rows, pull-ups, and push-ups and also when you’re lifting. For example:

• DB Shoulder Press @31×3

This means lower the DB for three seconds, pause for one second at the bottom, drive explosively and hold for three seconds overhead.

Adding tempo makes the movement considerably harder and helps you gain more strength and stability, especially in areas of the range of motion you’re currently weakest.

Upper Body Strength Key 2: Isometric Work

By definition, isometrics are a type of training where the joint angle and muscle length don’t change during the contraction. In other words, it’s when you’re essentially holding still, such as during a plank or a hollow hold.

Isometric work, however, can also be useful when it comes to building upper body strength.

Two movements I’m particularly fond of are:

1. Bottom of the Box or Ring Dip Hold

• Try 3 sets of an 80 percent effort hold. Don’t go to all-out failure, but hold until you start to struggle. See if you can press out of it at the end.

2. Chin Over the Bar Hold

• Perform 3 sets of an 80 percent effort hold. Try both a pronated and supinated grip here.

Upper Body Strength Key 3: Negatives

A negative is essentially working the eccentric part of the movement, meaning the portion of the movement when your muscle is lengthening as opposed to contracting. On a push-up, this would be when you’re lowering toward the ground, and on a pull-up, it’s when you’re lowering yourself back down into a dead-hang hold.

I have great success helping female clients get their first handstand push-up through working the negative portion of the movement.

1. Handstand Push-Up Negative

• Log 5 to 10 reps of an 8 to 10-second negative. Rest as needed in between reps.

2. Negative Pull-Up

• Log 5 to 10 reps of an 8-10 second negative. To make it more challenging, pause for 5 seconds when your arms are at a 90-degree angle. Rest as needed between reps.

Put It To Practice

Not only will adding tempo, isometric, and negative work to your upper body training help you gain strength, it will also help increase your stability and joint strength. And, it will add a little more variety so you’re less bored doing ring rows five days a week as you eagerly await your first pull-up.

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You can’t hide anymore. One of your arms is stronger than the other.

Left-right muscle imbalances are incredibly common, not just with your legs, but also in the upper body, and an easy way to iron out these imbalances is to work on some single-arm strength.

You’re doing a max bench press and the barbell starts to move on a bit of a diagonal.

You can’t hide anymore. One of your arms is stronger than the other.

Left-right muscle imbalances are incredibly common, not just with your legs, but also in the upper body, and an easy way to iron out these imbalances is to work on some single-arm strength.

Unilateral, or single-arm (or leg) work is also a great way to ensure you don’t overtrain your dominant side, which often starts taking over by default when it gets heavy. It also improves balance and core strength and helps with injury prevention and rehabilitation.

Below are five easy ways to get you moving in the right direction.

Related: Try These Arm Workouts for More Arm Size

1. Top Loaded Banded Floor Press

This is a single-arm floor press with a twist. While you’ll only be pushing with one arm at a time, the other arm will be working in an opposing force by pulling a band. Not only will this help you build strength, but it’s also an effective way to build more tension through your core as you’ll naturally have to brace a lot harder than you normally would due to the push-pull action that’s happening simultaneously.

Note: Keep your elbows at a 45-degree angle from your body with both the pushing and pulling arms, and make sure the pulling arm stays glued to the ground the entire time.

• Perform 3 sets of 10-12 reps per arm.

2. Top Loaded Banded Shoulder Press

This is similar to the above only now you’re pulling the band and holding it at the top of a chest-to-bar pull-up position, while the other arm rocks out shoulder presses.

• Perform 3 sets of 10-12 reps per arm.

3. Seesaw Shoulder Press

These are a great way to expose which arm is stronger, as you’ll certainly feel one arm start to tire faster than the other. Like the name says, this movement takes on a seesaw action, where one arm is pressing overhead as the other arm is lowering the dumbbell back down to the shoulder.

Keep these light with high reps to see if they expose a muscle imbalance. High reps will also help build some muscular endurance.

• Do 3 sets of 15-20 reps per arm.

4. Single Arm Dumbbell High Pull

For anyone who has lingering shoulder issues, beware: Don’t do these if you feel pain, and stop especially if any discomfort gets worse as you continue to do reps.

Most people find one arm is considerably stronger than the other on these, which also makes them a great movement for ironing out strength imbalances. Make sure your elbow remains above your hand on these reps, keep the DB close to your body, and lower the DB slowly and with control.

• Try 3 sets of 10 per arm. How heavy can you go for 10 reps?

5. Single Arm Ring Row

We have all done ring rows before, but the moment you turn them into single arm ring rows, you will look at the movement in a whole new light.

You will find you will probably have to keep your body much more vertical than you normally do with two arms. Make sure you keep a perfect hollow body position throughout the movement.

• Perform 3 sets of 8-10 reps per arm.

The post 5 Single Arm Strength Exercises to Improve Imbalance appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

When the hands are on the ground, they provide proprioceptive feedback to the brain, letting the brain know where the arm and the hand are located in space.¹ This feedback informs the nervous system what options are available to perform a specific action. The hands are sensory rich; their ability to perform fine motor skills requires a careful discussion between the nerves of the hand and the brain.²

How the hands integrate fully with the rest of the arm when your weight is on them is the starting place for how force is dealt with in the upper extremities.

Yet, the hands and wrists are often ignored during training. We expect them to work and are a bit miffed when they don’t. Unlike the hips, shoulders, ankles, and spine, little thought is given to how the mobility of the wrist determines the position of the elbow and shoulder, which is unfortunate, because the wrists and hands have the potential to unlock a wide range of movement possibilities in the upper extremities.

The Problem with Unused Hands and Wrists

If you were to not use your feet for 10 years, instead using a motorized chair to get around, and then one day you woke up and decided to ditch your chair and walk instead, how do you think your feet would feel? Stiff, weak, uncoordinated, and perhaps mildly irritated they were suddenly getting called to action after a decade of dormancy.

I think we can all agree the solution to this wouldn’t be to try and walk for an hour. That would certainly be a recipe for injury. Instead, you would walk a couple of minutes, see how you tolerated it, and then maybe you would walk a couple of minutes more. You would ease the feet back into function, not expecting them to support your weight for long periods of time until they became stronger.

It would stand to reason that the same principles should be applied to the hands and wrists. If you haven’t put weight on your wrists for years because your life hasn’t required you to get down on the floor, your wrists and hands won’t be used to bearing weight. They will likely be uncoordinated, stiff, and weak, just like the feet and ankles would be in the example above. If, one day, you decide to begin a fitness program that involves a lot of time in a hands and knees or plank position without paying much attention to how the wrists feel, you may notice soreness in your wrists, elbows, or shoulders.

How the Wrists and Hands Work

Your wrist can flex, extend, move the hand in, and move the hand out.³ Wrist mobility changes when the fingers are closed in a fist versus when the fingers are open and the hand is flat and, like all body parts, mobility is dependent upon how the area is regularly used. You adapt to the positions you are regularly in, and if you aren’t regularly in positions that demand much movement in your wrist, you won’t have much mobility in your wrist.

When you think about the hand during closed chain movements (movements when the hand is fixed, like during a pull up or push up), the amount of wrist mobility you need is dependent upon the angle of the body. For instance, if you do downdog, your weight is moving back, away from your hands. You don’t need as much mobility in your wrists to support that position as you do a straight arm push up position, which doesn’t require as much mobility as an arm balance where your weight is shifted forward. You get the idea.

Hand and Wrist Interactions

What’s interesting about this (at least to me), is researchers estimate that for most of our regular activities of daily life, we are only required to flex our wrist 10-15 degrees yet the wrist is capable to flexing 70-90 degrees in most adults.⁴ For wrist extension, our daily life only requires us to use about 35 percent of our available range of motion. This means we have a joint that is designed to move in a much fuller way than most people use it. This is actually a good argument for including weight bearing on the hands into your regular fitness routine.

The fingers orient the direction of the wrist, which depends how the elbow points. This is largely determined by the how you support yourself through your shoulder. If your fingers lack mobility, that will affect how the fingers spread; changing the base of support size for your body impacting how force can be distributed up the arm. The joints are designed to absorb load, while the bones transmit the forces from one joint to the next.⁵ If you want to maximize how strong you are in a push up position, hand and finger mobility matter.

One thing you will notice with the hands is, like the feet, they may look like they are supinating or pronating when in contact with the floor. What I mean by that is the fleshy part of the hand between the thumb and index finger may look like it’s strongly lifting away from the floor (supinating), dumping all of the weight into the pinkie finger side of the hand. It can also look like that same fleshy part is collapsing into the floor, almost like it’s pronating.

Think about what this means when it comes to dealing with load. If all of the load is being absorbed by the pinkie finger side of the hand or by the thumb side of the hand, how efficient is that? Not very, and when you consider how the load travels from the hand up to the elbow and from the elbow up to the shoulder, I think we can all agree there are probably more efficient ways to deal with gravity than loading one side of a supporting structure.

By focusing on how the hand interacts with the ground and developing active wrist mobility, you will change your relationship to gravity. Your ability to deal with the force up the arm will be more efficient and you will have more options for overall movement while on your hands.

Hand and Wrist Mobility

Let’s look at ways to improve your wrist and hand mobility. First, we’ll work on improving the overall sense of the hand with a simple mobility exercise.

• Turn your right hand up, so the palm faces the ceiling. Allow your hand to be relaxed.
• Touch your left thumb on the pad below the right pinkie finger (bear with me. I promise, you will like this).
• Gently press your left thumb into the pad and keep the gentle squeezing sensation as you move the thumb along the pinkie finger out to the tip.
• Do this three times and move on to the fourth finger. Repeat the gentle squeezing sensation on all of the fingers (the thumb is a touch awkward. You have to angle the left hand a little bit to get to the right thumb pad).
• Once you have finished, let your hands comfortably rest by your sides. Does your right hand feel different than your left?

Touch improves the map of a body area in our brain.⁶ It makes the area feel more alive and makes an area feel more pliable.

Do the left hand as well. Once you have done both hands, come into a hands and knees position. Can you spread the fingers evenly against the floor? Can you set yourself up so you are distributing the weight evenly across the fingers?

How to Increase Your Mobility

Now that you have increased your overall awareness of your hands, let’s look at ways to increase the mobility in the wrist. Please note that some of you might have a lot of wrist mobility and you actually need to learn how to find a sense of balanced stability in the wrist. That is a conversation for a different post.

The wrist should have the ability to flex and extend. Check your active mobility right now:

• Reach your arm out in front of you, as though you were going to place the hand on the wall directly ahead of you.
• Spread your fingers and point them up towards the ceiling, reaching the center of the palm towards the wall.
• Do your fingers go straight up towards the ceiling? Or do they barely raise above the level of the horizon?
• What happens if you rotate the hand so the fingers point towards the floor?
• Is that easier or harder?

If you don’t have the ability to flex the wrist near a ninety degree angle, what do you think happens when you place a large portion of your bodyweight into the hand to do a push up? Is your wrist dealing with the gravitation load of your body in an efficient way? How is that going to affect your brain’s sense of where you are located in space? And what do you think this means for support from the shoulder?

Fortunately, improving wrist mobility is less complicated than you might think. Below are a few warm up drills that address the needs of the wrist and how it interacts with the shoulder. Like the hand drills above, the standing mobility drills are a great way to break up your work day improve active range of motion in an area that is often used, but ignored.

The short videos below include a few easy hand drills that can be done to improve mobility. If you struggle with these, take breaks periodically throughout your day to practice (this is a great way to break up computer work). You will notice rapid improvements in coordination and mobility.

Assess Further: The Hand/Shoulder Relationship

Let’s assume you have worked out the wrist mobility and you can bear load evenly through the center of the palm and across the knuckles of the fingers. What role does the hand play on the shoulders?

• If you are in a hands and knees position and you looked at your arm from the side, what would you see? The wrist, elbow, and shoulder would be in a fairly straight line. (If it’s not in a fairly straight line, see the mobility drills in the above section). Now, for the purposes of today, let’s consider the arm starts at the shoulder blade. What does this mean?
• If you reach your hand into the floor, the elbow, shoulder, and shoulder blade are going to move towards the floor. If your hand gets lighter on the floor, the elbow, shoulder, and shoulder move away from the floor.
• Now, keeping your hands exactly where they are, imagine you are trying to move your hands together. Don’t move them, just pretend like they are pulling the floor together. There will be a sense of the arms moving together and work will happen in the chest (because that’s one of the things the chest muscles do). Now, pretend like you are pulling your hands away from each other. The opposite happens and you will feel work through the outsides of your shoulders.
• Finally, pull your hands towards your feet. Your shoulder blades move down (remember, they are part of the arm), you feel your mid back and maybe your abs.

Everything Is Connected

If you struggle with your shoulders during exercises where your hand is fixed, redirect your attention to your hands. Improve your wrist mobility, begin feeling the connection between the hands and the shoulder blades, and enhance your awareness of the fingers. In order for the arm move efficiently, integrity is required throughout the structure. A movement is only as good as the sum of the mobility and integration of its parts.

References:

1. Goble, D.J., & Anguera, J.A., (2010). Plastic changes in hand proprioception following force field motor learning. Journal of Neurophysiology, 104(3), 1213-1215.

2. Balasubramanian, R., & Santos, V.J., (2014). The Human Hand as an Inspiration for Robot Hand Development. Springer: New York.

3. Informed Health Online [Internet]. Cologne, Germany: Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG); 2006. How does the hand work? 2010 Aug 31 [Updated 2016 Dec 23].

4. Hamill, J., & Knutzen, K.M., (2006). Biomechanical Basis of Human Movement. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins: Baltimore.

5. Abernathy, B., Hanrahan, S., & Kippers, V., Pandy, M., McManus, A., & Mackinnon, L., (2013). Biophysical Foundations of Human Movement, 3rd Edition. Human Kinetics: Champaign, IL.

6. Gardner, E. P. 2010. Touch. eLS.

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