When a Good Muscle Goes Bad: 4 Ways to Bring Back the Balance

Wall have favorites. Yours might be your biceps, your lats, calves, or some other muscle group you like the appearance or function of. Your ‘go to’ muscles are the ones that are strong, the ones you can always count on. They make certain exercises easy and they are often the exercises you like doing a bunch of. After all, we like to feel successful, don’t we?

Then there are the others…the laggers, the ‘not so quick to jump in and help’ muscles. These are often on the posterior body like hamstrings, triceps, lower traps, or glutes, but not always. We blame their lazy nature for our body woes. When we target these muscles with certain exercises they almost seem to know how to weasel out of doing the work. Is that what’s really going on? Maybe not.

More often than not, your WEAK muscle is ‘inhibited’ by your GOOD one. What that means is that the weak muscle’s invitation to the party never arrived because it was hijacked by the good muscle! Yes, those beloved lats have sabotaged your ability to strengthen those pecs (or whichever muscle relationship we are talking about).  If your body is being pulled out of balance by one of these bullying muscles, strengthening the opposing muscle to achieve balance can be a seriously uphill battle. In addition, making the weak muscle pull against one that is already chronically pulling, can make for a tug-of-war in your body. Where there is war, there is no peace. Bodies working in this way repetitively will eventually find a connective tissue mess that restricts ROM, impedes healthy joint function, and imprints compensatory neuromuscular patterning that won’t have longevity as a goal.

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