Bodybuilding exercises build your muscles and sculpt your physique. Performing a workout, especially a workout with extra heavy weights, is like molding your muscles and placing them in a kiln. They eventually maintain the form that you sculpted during your training sessions. Symmetry plays an integral role in the sculpting process. Working your muscles in a balanced manner helps you maintain a functional postural alignment.
Posture
Bodybuilding exercise only plays a partial role in developing posture and muscular proportion. Daily postural habits and movement patterns also contribute to the sculpting process. Some bodybuilding workouts inadvertently reinforce dysfunctional habits, warn certified personal trainers and kinesiology specialists Eric Cressey and Mike Robertson. They blame technology and workplace ergonomics for this problem. A posture of hunched shoulders, rounded upper back and forward head characterizes many constant computer users. This alignment overworks some muscle groups while overstretching others, explain Cressey and Robertson. If you go to the gym and continue to focus on your stronger muscles while ignoring your weaker ones, you sculpt a body with poor posture and muscle proportion. Balancing muscle groups is the first step in creating symmetry and proportion.
Chest and Back
Some personal trainers refer to the chest or pectoral muscles as the "beach muscles" because they are the first thing someone sees if they approach you on the beach. The muscles in your back are equally important but often are neglected, which can lead to a disproportionate physique. The chest fly exercise, a bodybuilder's favorite, creates cleavage in the front of the body. If your front cleavage is out of proportion with your rear or upper back cleavage, you eventually develop a slouched posture. Exercises such as the seated row, rear deltoid fly and the lat pulldown create front-to-back symmetry, improving your alignment and ease of movement.
Leg Symmetry
Leg muscle imbalances also affect postural alignment and muscular proportion. Your hamstrings should be at least 80 percent as strong as your quadriceps, says track and field coach Brian Mackenzie. Your quadriceps, located in the front of the leg, extend your knees. Your hamstrings, which sit in the back of your leg, bend your knee. Since many people have stronger quadriceps than hamstrings, they use more weight on the leg extension machine than the leg curl, thereby exacerbating this imbalance and sculpting the leg muscles out of proportion.
Correcting Leg Imbalances
A hamstring or quadriceps muscle imbalance may cause you to lock your knees when you are in a standing position. Since your thighs connect to your pelvis, locking your knees causes you to shift your weight back into your heels, arching your lower back. Arching your lower back causes distinct proportion and postural problems, making your belly look rounder. Since it causes your back to work harder than your abdominal muscles, it might also weaken your abdominal muscles. The leg extension machine isolates an already strong muscle group. Instead, perform exercises such as the leg press and the squat, which work your hamstrings in conjunction with your quadriceps.
