Have you ever been injured and thought about cancelling a workout thinking you can't workout?
Well guess what ... You CAN still attend your workouts even if you've injured. Let's explain the how and more importantly why.
One of the most fascinating things about the human body is how strength training affects more than just the muscle you're working.
In physiology there is a term called the cross-educated effect. The cross-education effect (also called cross-transfer) has been known in science for more than 120 years, and it originally came from early neuroscience and motor learning research, not strength training. The phenomenon was first documented by Edward Wheeler Scripture at Yale University in 1894. Scripture observed that when participants practiced strengthening or skill tasks with one limb, the opposite untrained limb also improved in strength and coordination. This was one of the earliest demonstrations that motor learning occurs in the brain, not just in the muscle.
The concept was revisited and expanded through modern neuroscience and strength research, particularly through work by researchers like Digby G. Sale, Lee E. Brown and Anthony J. Blazevich. These studies used EMG, brain imaging, and strength testing to show that cross-education is mainly driven by:
Neural adaptations in the motor cortex
Increased corticospinal excitability
Reduced interhemispheric inhibition between brain hemispheres
Modern meta-analyses show the contralateral limb (untrained limb) usually gains about:
~20% strength increase on average
Up to ~50–94% of the trained limb’s improvement in some cases
Knowing this, we are able to continue your workouts to strengthen to rest of your body BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY knowing that you are still gaining strength in the injuries limb. If yo or someone you know has a broken leg or arm or some other injury, training the uninjured limbcan:
reduce strength loss in the injured limb
speed up rehabilitation
maintain neural drive