Dealing with Asymmetries in Comp Lifts
“My left glute doesn’t engage as much as my right,”
“Why does my bar lean to the side when I’m squatting?”
“My hips like to shift to one side…”
“My right shoulder is weaker than my left,”
As a Powerlifting coach, these are common questions and comments I receive from clients.
As humans, our bodies are inherently imperfect and asymmetric (but more on that later), and this will show up in our lifts. The barbell is a form of instant feedback on our movement patterns and what we must address, to improve many measures, not least of which: strength. How we move a weight will determine how much we can lift.
We are putting ourselves in bilateral movement patterns, hoping to lift loads of kilos with every bodily region working together simultaneously. In this quest, sometimes faulty habits, compensations, and deficits arise.
One of these common issues involves asymmetries: where one side of the body does something differently. Note: We are discussing asymmetries between the two sides, not within the same joint (right arm vs. left, not your hamstring compared to your quad).
Like many technique faults, this can become a self-fulfilling prophecy and a form of fear-mongering. Having asymmetries has previously been catastrophized, considered to "cause" injury or be a pressing issue, but this may not always be true.
The relevant factors are a) the degree of unevenness and b) how that shows up in your lifts & how you feel physically. Like many other strength training topics, we must individualize our approach: taking it on a case-by-case basis. In many instances, asymmetries indicate other underlying issues, and addressing them can improve performance, what have you- but we must be careful with how we view and discuss this topic.
What does it mean to be “asymmetrical”?
We all have a dominant side of our body. We’ve been writing with one hand and kicking with one leg since early childhood. All those small habits add up over time, leading us to favor one side over the other.
With a bilateral, full-body movement pattern, you will notice imbalances, especially in less experienced strength athletes. We are not perfect robots designed solely for forklift purposes: we are human beings with past backgrounds and experiences, imperfectly-built bodies, and barbell lifts will highlight this.
Asymmetry can show up in a variety of ways, and varying degrees, including:
SQUATS:
Hips shifting to one side on the ascent or descent,
Hitting depth shallower on one side vs. the other,
The bar leaning to one side on your back,
One knee caving in/out more than the other,
One shoulder more externally rotated than the other,
BENCH:
One elbow tucking/flaring more than the other,
One shoulder more depressed/extended than the other,
One arm locking out before the other, the bar leaning to one side,
DEADLIFT:
One knee locking out before the other,
The bar shifting to one side on the ascent,
“Helicoptering” the bar at the start of the lift (one shoulder in front of the other/one lat engaging more so than the other),
(Sumo) One hip more externally rotated than the other,
One knee caving in more so than the other
You get the gist: asymmetries describe unevenness somewhere in the body during a competition lift. Analyze videos/technique of your reps and look for imbalances here. Do you notice anything different on one side?
Some asymmetries will be slight, and others will be more drastic and noticeable- something you can genuinely feel. With overall technique, we generally want to avoid extreme deviations from the “norm” or “standard,” with degrees of variance in between. The naked eye, video feedback, and form assessment can show whether your asymmetry is glaringly obvious or relatively subtle.
2. Is it possible to be symmetrical?
Working toward “perfect symmetry” can distract from other (more important) pursuits. It’s arbitrary, unrealistic, and downright impossible to achieve.
Chasing symmetry at the expense of:
pursuing strength,
emphasizing technique as a whole,
drilling movement patterns, gaining proficiency & confidence in your lifts-
deters you from more relevant metrics.
We have to prioritize the aspects that truly matter and support us long-term, and unnecessarily chasing a moving target, one that is unattainable at best and hindering at worst is not worth your energy.
A 2022 meta-analysis* dove into the literature around asymmetries across sports and how they impact athletes. The author declared that “Asymmetry may be widespread even in high-performance sports, and that though this is often thought to be “detrimental to sports performance of athletes, previous studies do not fully support this association.”* Essentially, the widespread message around the "danger" of being asymmetrical is unsubstantiated.
There are many causes of our lack of symmetry, as listed below, but some are structural. About 90% of people have a leg-length discrepancy**, the spine is abnormal- our spines are not perfectly straight and centric, etc. We have no control over these variables.
It’s also important to discuss the severity of these differences, as the “degree of asymmetry determines whether an athlete may have a potential injury risk.”*
Just like other technical aspects, there's a range of guidelines. In our execution of movement, a grey area exists, but we want to avoid the extremes.
There’s a potential for injury with higher levels of unevenness as it can “contribute to the increase of unilateral limb damage such as ACL injuries, especially in female athletes.”* That said, the number of studies looking directly at injury risk in Powerlifters, who perform movements in a very controlled environment, in a non-contact sport, is extremely minimal, and the “methods used to assess symmetry vary greatly,”* so we can’t draw this line directly, and should not induce more fear around strength training.
We must remember that, as a whole, all strength sports have low injury rates, and Powerlifting "(which is very “balanced”), doesn’t seem to be any more dangerous than weightlifting (which is notably “unbalanced,” unless you’re one of the rare people who squat jerk or power jerk instead of split jerking)," an important point raised by Greg Nuckols.** Many high-level athletes lift big weights with imperfect bodies- and still- the risk is significantly low compared to other sports.
Additionally, it’s important to note that lifters who squat a barbell for the first time will rarely do so perfectly. Overall bodily awareness and motor learning should be the focus and with that; these issues can solve themselves.
There’s no reason to chase “perfect” symmetry if it’s not negatively impacting your strength, movement quality, or outside the general “norm” in technique. In other words, slight deviations or imbalances here and there, with continued improvements in performance, recovery, and proficiency, don’t need to be over-analyzed too much. A telltale sign is how this changes over the course of your sets/load on the bar. If you've got a slight imbalance even at warm-up weights vs. if your shift drastically changes with more load- that can indicate whether this is technical or structural.
That said, sometimes asymmetries do hinder performance- and in that case, are worth addressing.
3. When does this become an issue?
A) Increased Pain
If there is reason to believe that an asymmetry contributes to your pain, it’s necessary to work on fixing it and modifying the technique.
Pain is due to many factors and often doesn’t have one sole cause, but an overload of stress to a given area (or overall) certainly contributes. With a severe asymmetry, that region takes on more load than the other.
If you’re chronically shifting to one side in a squat-
or excessively caving in with one knee vs. the other,
Pain levels can increase due to this additional loading applied.
Especially with other variables in place (poor sleep, high training volumes/intensities, improper nutrition), but even potentially, as is, asymmetry has the potential to increase pain. If you’re habitually noticing pain during- and/or after a lift with identified unevenness, work on creating more symmetry. A few solutions will be listed below.
B) Negatively Impacting Performance
The second reason to address asymmetry is when it’s impacting your performance. Because strength is never linear, the cause can be hard to measure, but again, observing technique is helpful here.
Severe asymmetries show technical error and room for growth, probably hindering your potential for strength. You’ll see this at higher-intensity sets if:
An uneven lockout on Bench press causes you to fail the weight, that other arm won’t finish the rep,
Hip shift or Bar lean causes you to dump the bar, losing back tension, unable to escape the hole,
a Helicopter bar prevents you from finishing the top of a deadlift,
You’ll want to address these differences. After all, the goal is to continue pushing more weight. If your current technique prevents you from doing that, it's not serving you.
Additionally, asymmetries can potentially impact your success on meet day. If uneven lockouts, lat engagement, bar path, etc. prevent you from:
Hitting depth in your squat on both sides,
Achieving a clean lockout in your deadlift,
Exceeds what’s “legal” (excessive uneven lockout in bench press doesn’t count),
Then that directly affects your success as a Powerlifter.
4. Potential causes of Asymmetry
With severe asymmetries (those unrelated to purely having an imperfect body), there are many possible causal factors, and the result may be a combination of multiple. Identify where the weakness stems from, so you can successfully improve your technique; and therefore, your lifts.
A) Loss of tension
This mistake is prevalent in newbie lifters and can breed many issues within a given lift. If you lose your brace, your upper back tension, the setup you’ve created-you’ve just given yourself an inefficiency, an unnecessary obstacle to overcome, and your body will compensate in whatever way possible to grind out that lift.
Dump the bar on your squat? Your hips might shift.
Forget to pull the slack out or set your lats? The bar will probably helicopter in your deadlift.
Rush your descent, lose your shoulder positioning? Your elbows may flare/tuck unevenly on your bench press.
With this fault, it's not that one side is inherently stronger- it's that,
You didn’t properly manage your positioning through the set/rep, arising in an overcorrection on one side vs. the other.
The focus here is to maintain tension. Tempo reps & pauses are astronomically helpful in achieving this goal. A controlled lift is a tight, stable one: and these variations can help lifters work around these issues.
Additionally, focusing on just taking more time in both the setup and the lift itself, thinking about one or two cues that are specifically helpful during the rep, can help address these. Filming your sets is also highly recommended- to see where you went wrong and how to fix it.
B) Poor Setup
Building on that last point, how you set up for a lift will dictate how you perform during.
Sometimes, asymmetries are due to faulty positioning from the start:
The bar is uneven on your back when you squat,
One shoulder being more tucked down than the other, in your bench press,
Starting with the bar too far away in your deadlift,
It takes a well-trained coach to give an eye to these things so that you can improve upon them as an athlete. A tip that can help anyone, though:
Don’t attempt a lift until you feel 100% certain, confident, and in control over the weight.
Always ensure you're lined up evenly on the bar: finding a point (usually the knurling) to place your grip,
Have someone check for your shoulder alignment under the barbell and on the bench,
Stay focused on creating tension before the lift begins, so you can better maintain it. Proper cueing can enhance your execution:
"Spreading the bar” for squats and bench presses can help: like you’re expanding through your elbows,
“Tucking” your shoulders, depressing your scapula for bench press, etc. Find one that works.
Keep the bar close during deadlifts, starting with it against your shins before you pull, and think about “pulling the bar into your body,” creating lat tension. If you’re constantly noticing that “helicopter” issue during your deadlift, you may want to give Hook grip a try- the imbalance in mixed grip can inherently create some asymmetries in lat position, but more on that here: Hook Grip Article
It’s also worth playing with your grip width, foot position, degree of toe out, stance width, etc.- during your lifts to see if you can find a more reliable, efficient setup.
With severe hip/upper body shifts in lifts, sometimes just cueing to the opposite direction (“shift to your right!”) can fix the issue. Film yourself from different angles (Front, side, back) to notice these changes in positioning.
C) Athletic Background
Another potential reason for any asymmetry, where one side is stronger (or more mobile) than the other- is due to sports history.
In athletes with a previous dominance, such as boxers (their primary leg is stronger), basketball players, dancers, etc. (this can occur in many different sports), your body is used to prioritizing one side over the other, and when met with a bilateral lift, shifting to firing both simultaneously, will feel unnatural.
In this instance, cueing more to that less dominant side (to ensure your other one doesn’t take over) will be helpful, as well as playing with modifiable factors, tempo, starting with low loads to practice form, and potentially regressing the movement, depending on the severity of the imbalance.
Additionally, unilateral work will be helpful here: not only for the strengthening component- but also to help your brain connect with the other half of your body- so you can do the same in competition movements.
It takes a while to strengthen your weaker side, and you’ll never reach a point of both being 100% equal, but with cueing and technique work, you can continue progressing load & movement quality simultaneously. You don’t have to swap one for the other. Work gradually and slowly, and over time, you’ll get stronger and more proficient.
D) Past trauma/injuries
A final relevant reason for severe asymmetries is a past trauma or injury to the body.
In athletes with a shoulder or knee injury, for example, that side will often have developed some compensations & be generally weaker than the non-injured side, especially depending on the rehab process, how long it’s been, etc.
Your brain & nervous system have become accustomed to “protecting” or potentially “avoiding” this side, which your lifts will reflect.
Not only strength- but mobility can differ here, too- and if that’s the case, you’ll want to focus on single-limb mobility exercises, pre-lift and during days off, to add to the other solutions mentioned above.
An under-discussed topic: brain injuries- athletes who have been in comas, suffered severe accidents, illness, etc., will have established different ways of moving in that rehabilitation process. In this case, it will take longer to develop movement patterns in general, not to mention more technical & specific ones like the Powerlifts- but it is possible. There are many examples of comeback stories out there!
A similar case shows up in those just lacking body awareness- lifetime sedentary humans, or those who feel athletically challenged, are coming to lifting later in life, who may struggle to conceptualize their body in space & how to control it- which can make understanding technique & applying it, harder.
Remain focused on developing consistency and confidence with technique, improving over time. Choose exercises that inherently help lifters understand their bodies & how to control them- this could look like scaling exercises down to a Goblet squat, KB deadlift, DB bench press, adding in lots of tempos, starting with light weights, checking in after each set to see how it felt, and using minimal cueing.
Use very visual cues (“Spread a crack in the middle of the ground” to cue external rotation, “Squeeze an orange in your armpits!” to cue lat tension). Make smaller, conservative jumps in weight when you're still acclimating to the movement, and focus on developing confidence and self-efficacy. Everyone can learn how to barbell squat, bench press, and deadlift if they want to, and we want to make that as accessible as possible.
For those dealing with severe hip shift, I want to share this helpful cueing tool: using a band. Tie a light band around your hip & the squat rack, and perform your reps with this, helping your brain drill more symmetry: Banded Squat
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Asymmetries, unevenness. It’s a concern that many lifters and new athletes state, and in some cases, is more warranted than others. Our bodies are far from perfect (though they achieve pretty amazing things), and we will never be perfectly even. Chasing this standard is an arbitrary and impossible reach, potentially deterring from more relevant goals. That said, if asymmetry occurs significantly, impacting pain levels and/or performance, it’s certainly worth addressing, and there are solutions to help you manage it. Analyze your current technique, how you feel during and after, and how other variables (volume, intensity, fatigue) impact your unevenness- then determine if you have something to be "fixed." Asymmetry is unavoidable, to a degree, but severe discrepancies probably won't help you, either.
References
*Gao, Zixiang. “The Effect of Application of Asymmetry Evaluation in Competitive Sports ...” PAAH Physical Activity and Health, 30 Nov. 2022, www.paahjournal.com/articles/10.5334/paah.215.
**Nuckols, Greg. “How Important Is Muscular Symmetry for Strength Sports? • Stronger by Science.” Stronger by Science, 5 Aug. 2023, www.strongerbyscience.com/important-muscular-symmetry-strength-sports/.
