Man only works out one side of his body for 100 days to see crazy impact it makes
Fitness challenges on YouTube are nothing new, so to stand out nowadays you have to do something pretty weird.
YouTuber James Chewbonic set himself a challenge to train just one side of his body for 100 days.
He said he did it just to see whether the difference would eventually become obvious.
While most people heading to the gym would aim to work their whole body, James decided to split his down the middle.
Advert
His experiment involved exercising only his left side, leaving the right to carry on without any deliberate training.
James, who admitted he had never been much of a regular at the gym, wanted to find out whether focusing exclusively on one side would produce a noticeable physical change.
It meant choosing exercises that could be performed independently on each side, including bicep curls, pistol squats, single-arm dumbbell presses and side planks.
He also attempted to divide his diet in two, with one half geared towards supporting his fitness goals and the other made up of less nutritious choices.
When asked how he could be certain that the food and nutrients were benefiting only the side he was training, James had a simple response: “That’s a great question ... the answer is I’m not.”
Would the result be negligible, or would he end up looking like some human fiddler crab?
So how did it work out, or half work out, in the end?
After weeks of working out, he looked in the mirror and noticed that aesthetically, there didn't seem to be that much difference between one side and the other.
But what about the strength?
To test this, James compared holding a side plank on his weak side and his strong side to see just how much of a difference, if any, was made.
On his weak side, he managed to hold the plank for one minute and 14 seconds.
But on the side where he'd been working out it was a different story entirely, with James managing to go for four minutes.
"That was one of my original goals at the start of this video ticked off," he said, "but I think it's fair to say that even if there's not much difference in the way my abs look, there is so much difference in the strength of them."
He concluded: "I have proven that if you work out half your body, then half your body gets stronger, what a revelation," the YouTuber added self-deprecatingly.
He did also do the tried-and-tested before-and-after photo cliché of fake-tanning himself to the colour of creosote, which also seemed to make a difference.
James also tested other movements during the experiment, including unilateral strength exercises designed to isolate individual muscles.
The results reinforced the distinction between developing visible muscle and improving physical performance.
Hopefully he'll now spend time down the gym evening out the strength on the other side of his body, even if it didn't give him the buff mirror pic results he was obviously hoping for.
Maybe give the fake tan a miss, though.
Kit Roberts
