Hey {{first name | reader}},
It’s Tuesday, which means your weekly fitness check-in. Welcome to Week #37.
This week I found myself in the gym with one leg perched precariously on a bench, groaning my way through three sets of Bulgarian split squats.
Full disclosure: I loathe Bulgarian split squats.
They rotate in and out of my routine, and right now I do them once a week, which is exactly once a week more than I would choose. Even thinking about them makes my glutes ache.
It would be very easy to decide that life is short and Bulgarian split squats are optional.
Unfortunately, they are also extremely good at exposing two things I need to work on: balance and the difference in strength between my legs.
This is one of the less charming lessons I’ve learned from years of training: sometimes the exercise you most want to skip is the one pointing directly at something you need.
The Naga, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco
I’ve learned to pay attention to the exercises I routinely avoid.
Heavy deadlifts? Delightful. Squats? Yes, please. Bench press? Put more weight on the bar. Biceps curls in almost any configuration? A tiny recreational activity masquerading as exercise.
Single-leg hamstring work that reveals exactly how much weaker my left leg is?
Suddenly I remember an urgent email I need to answer.
Avoidance can be information.
Not always. Sometimes you hate an exercise because it hurts, because you lack the equipment or skill to do it properly, or because there are twelve perfectly good alternatives that accomplish the same thing.
But sometimes you hate it because it’s hard in a very specific way. It exposes the thing you’re not good at.
That’s useful information.
My annual oh-my-God-it’s-September review has reminded me that I’ve been emphasizing some parts of fitness more than others. I like being strong, so I train strength consistently. Other qualities require more deliberate attention.
CrossFit famously defined fitness across ten domains: cardiovascular endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, speed, coordination, agility, balance and accuracy. You don’t have to subscribe to CrossFit theology to appreciate the larger point: being very good at one thing does not make you good at everything.
And within any one category, we have weak spots.
The question is what to do with them.
One useful answer is: put the priority work early.
Research on resistance-training order has found that exercises performed near the beginning of a workout generally get more repetitions, and over time the exercises prioritized earlier may also make greater strength gains.1
This is not revolutionary science. Fatigue exists.
But it has practical consequences. Put the Bulgarian split squats at the very end of my workout and there’s an excellent chance I will discover that I have suddenly run out of time.
So I do them first.
Back in “Week 20: Your Weaker Side,” we talked about lateral strength differences and the tendency of the dominant side to compensate for the weaker one. That’s still the imbalance I’m most interested in fixing.
Upper-body training has its own version. One small 2013 study of recreationally active adults found participants could perform substantially more timed pushing than pulling work, particularly among the women tested.2 That doesn’t establish a magical push-to-pull ratio everyone should follow. It does give me another reason not to let all the exercises I enjoy crowd out the ones I need.
Which, unfortunately, brings us back to pull-ups.
The larger lesson isn’t that every weakness deserves equal attention or that fitness requires turning yourself into a perfectly balanced human Swiss Army knife.
It’s simpler than that.
Notice what you keep avoiding.
Then ask why.
Sometimes the answer will be: because I hate Bulgarian split squats.
And sometimes the next question should be: Yes, but why?
📖 ASK ME ANYTHING
Question: Do I have to do an exercise I hate?
Answer: No.
But before you banish it forever, figure out what kind of hate you’re dealing with.
I hate it because I’m bad at it.
This is the category worth investigating. Lack of skill can make an exercise awkward and frustrating. A little practice, coaching or regression may change the experience considerably.
I hate it because it exposes a weakness.
Hello, Bulgarian split squat.
These are the exercises I’m most suspicious of when I hear myself making excuses. If an exercise is safe, useful and difficult because it exposes a deficit, I’m reluctant to give myself a pass.
I keep hoping that eventually it will get easier.
This strategy has had mixed results.
I hate it because it hurts.
Different situation. Hard exertion is uncomfortable. Injury pain is information. Sharp pain, worsening pain or pain associated with an injury is not something to “push through.”
I hate it for some completely unrelated reason.
Also legitimate.
People tell me they hate running because it’s boring.3
I don’t swim because managing my hair before, during and after a swim requires more enthusiasm for swimming than I possess. So I get my cardio elsewhere.
You do not owe any particular exercise your loyalty.
Just know why you’re breaking up with it.
💡 MYTH BUSTING
Myth: A strong two-legged squat means both legs are equally strong.
Reality: Not necessarily.
Bilateral exercises tell you what your body can accomplish with both sides working together. They don’t tell you exactly how much each side contributed.
Your body is very good at getting a job done. If one side is stronger, more coordinated or simply more comfortable with the movement, it can sometimes compensate in ways that aren’t obvious from the number on the bar.
That’s different from what researchers call the bilateral deficit — the curious finding that, in some tests, the force produced by two limbs simultaneously can be lower than the sum of what each limb can produce separately. The size of that effect varies considerably by movement, testing method and training history.4
Neither phenomenon gives you permission to diagnose an imbalance from your squat rack.
If you actually want to know whether one side is weaker, test or train the sides separately: split squats, step-ups, single-leg curls, single-arm presses or rows.
A squat tells you what your legs can do together.
Sometimes you need to separate them to find out who is doing what.
🍽️ RADISH FUEL BOX
I keep frozen fish fillets in my freezer. Sometimes barramundi, sometimes cod, sometimes tilapia. Whenever I see a bargain, I buy them.
They are one of my easiest emergency proteins: no planning, no defrosting, no culinary ambitions required.
I bake them one at a time in the toaster oven.
Lazy Baked Fish
1 frozen fish fillet
1 tablespoon olive oil
½ lemon, sliced
Fresh or dried herbs — rosemary, thyme, parsley, whatever is lingering in the refrigerator5
Freshly ground pepper
Seasoned salt
Place the frozen fillet on a piece of aluminum foil. Drizzle with olive oil and season with pepper and seasoned salt. Layer the lemon slices and herbs over the top, then seal the foil into a packet.
Bake at 350°F until the fish is opaque and flakes easily. Cooking time will depend on the fish and thickness of the fillet; if you’re checking temperature, fish is considered safely cooked at 145°F.
Serve with whatever vegetable requires the least intervention.
Dinner accomplished.
📚 WORTH YOUR TIME
BodySpec, “Single-Leg Training: Exercises, Benefits & Plans”
A useful breakdown of why unilateral training belongs in a strength program, plus progressions if balancing on one leg currently feels more Cirque du Soleil than exercise.
I especially like the practical advice to begin unilateral exercises with your weaker side. That prevents the stronger side from setting a standard the weaker one can’t match and makes it harder to quietly give the weak side less work.
You do not need to progress all the way to Bulgarian split squats.
Although apparently I do.
💪 TRY THIS WEEK
We all have our own Bulgarian split squat.
What’s yours?
Identify one movement you routinely postpone, shorten or mysteriously forget.
Then ask yourself why.
If it hurts, find another option.
If you genuinely hate it and another exercise does the same job, switch.
But if you’re avoiding it because it exposes something you’re not very good at?
Put it first this week.
See what happens.
Stay strong,
{{first name | reader}}
P.S. Do the hard thing first. Otherwise you may discover an urgent need to reorganize your gym bag.
1 A 2012 review of the resistance-training literature concluded that exercises performed earlier in a workout tend to get greater total training volume, and that exercises prioritized earlier may see greater strength improvements over time. The practical recommendation: order exercises according to what matters most to your training goal.
2 Negrete and colleagues tested 180 recreationally active adults using timed push-ups and modified pull-ups. The women in the study completed considerably more pushing than pulling repetitions. The researchers themselves cautioned that these were preliminary reference values from these particular tests, not a universal ideal strength ratio.
3 My standard response is that this means they aren’t running hard enough. Running is considerably less boring when you are occupied with managing how much it hurts. Generally this observation is not well received, but I persist.
4 The bilateral deficit is real but inconsistent. Studies have found anything from essentially no deficit to sizable differences depending on the task and population. A 2026 review found it more consistently in dynamic than isometric movements and emphasized that training specificity matters.
5 I always have random leftover herbs from some recipe. Throwing them onto fish allows me to feel both resourceful and morally superior to the version of myself who usually finds them liquefied in the back of the refrigerator.