[nickbb10]

As the rain sets in here in the PNW and school ramps up, I’m looking to shift my focus more to strength and hard climbing fitness. Over the last 6mo I’ve acummulated 240hr of aerobic training, up from 185hr in my last 6mo block, so pretty significant progress! That time was about equally split between hiking and mt biking to help keep my bad ankle healthy(https://uphillathlete.com/forums/topic/returning-to-training-after-breaking-leg-badly/). I’m a couple weeks in to my transition period, and looking forward to getting back in to the max strength phase! However, I have developed a noticeable muscle imbalance between my “good” and “bad” legs over the summer season, about 20% difference in size. I think the main reason is because it have quite limited range of motion in my ankle, especially in dorisflexion(never fully came back, no matter how hard I tried) Doesn’t bother me much, expect rocking on to really high high steps and running downhill fast. My question is if it would be worthwhile to do a focused hypertrophy period to get the bad leg caught up in size? I am on the fence because obviously extra muscle is extra weight, and due to the limited ROM I may not be able to use the extra mass effectively. On the other hand, getting it stronger and more durable is probably a good thing for long term health.
Any thoughts would be appreciated!
Nick

Topic

[Anonymous]

Anonymous on October 24, 2018 at 9:13 pm #14113

Nick:
What is the difference in strength between legs. That’s way more important than size. I’ve had a leg size difference for 40 years since spending 6 months with one leg in a full length cast. But the smaller leg is actually stronger.

I’d focus on a max strength period with extra sets for the weaker leg.

Scott

[nickbb10]

nickbb10 on October 30, 2018 at 10:55 am #14195

Hi Scott, thanks for the reply! I did some experimenting yesterday in the gym to find an exercise to give an apples to apples comparison with the ROM difference. Settled on one legged half squats and leg extension machine. Found no real difference with leg extension, but with the half squat at the heavier weight(2-3 rep max,50% more than last winter on the bad leg!) I was limited by the stability of my ankle. For the next few weeks I’m going to focus on getting the stability up to snuff to get the most out of the max strength training later on. I guess the summer of high volume, no strength training and ignoring my my PT exercises from the past 2 yrs is probably the culprit of the instability!
Thanks!
Nick