The Myth of Symmetry

6 years ago, I had intense left-sided low back pain.

The pain lasted for the better part of an ENTIRE year. It hurt to sit, bend over, and look down at the ground.

Along my quest to figure out exactly what was wrong with me, I stumbled upon a video about posture correction and low back pain.

In this video, the internet expert said that if you have left-sided low-back pain, it’s because your whole body is twisted and asymmetrical. Asymmetry was—in his mind—the root cause of my pain. And in addressing the asymmetry, my pain would go away.

The internet expert then went on to explain exactly what the left side and right side of my body looked and moved like relative to one another.

I was shocked.

This internet expert, who had literally never seen me, knew the exact position of my flared left ribcage, how my spine was oriented toward the right, and how my left hip was lacking in internal rotation.

It was the first time I ever felt like someone validated the experience I was having. It felt amazing.

Until I did everything he said for months and none of it worked.

The sad truth...

Is that I believed this internet expert had the exact solution for me, simply because he could describe something relatable.

But looking back, the false confidence is totally shocking.

Ok, so let’s say someone is asymmetrical in the exact way you describe—how do you KNOW that the asymmetry is causing the problem? How can you be fully confident that gaining more range of motion will fix the pain? How do you know that asymmetry wasn’t a solution that actually kept someone out of pain for a long time?

He didn’t know. He doesn’t know. No one knows or even can know for sure.

Yet this is how many internet experts communicate.

The happy truth...

Is that humans are asymmetrical by nature, and that asymmetry is not inherently a problem or something that needs to be fixed.

For those of you who are skeptical:

• Human motion is defined by asymmetry. You can’t walk or run without an asymmetrical posture.
• From the inside-out, you’re asymmetrical. Your right/left diaphragms are totally different sizes. Your heart sits on the left side of your chest wall. Your internal organs all weigh different amounts and sit on different sides of your gut.
• You’re most likely right- or left-handed, and even if you’re ambidextrous, you likely favor single sides of your body for different activities.

Everything about you screams asymmetry. You’ve literally lived different lives on your right and left sides.

But now, because you have pain, and because someone sounds convincing, you think the thing that you’ve been your whole life is now the primary source of your problem?

Some of my students want to fix asymmetry in their exercises even though they don’t have any pain or sensations that are different side-to-side.

This kind of thinking is part of the disease of social media, which has sold people the lie that:

1. You should be symmetrical (you’re not—I’ve trained hundreds of people, and zero of them are symmetrical).
2. If you have pain, the first place you should look is posture.

In my experience as a coach, thinking either of the above is pretty much never helpful.

Here’s what’s helpful:

If you don’t have pain, but you’re asymmetrical, recognize this is normal, and that if you take issue with it, you’re dealing with an emotional blockage, not a physical one.

If you have pain, resist the urge to diagnose yourself, and instead, look at all the ways in which you’re loading the painful area, and seek to understand how you could load that area differently.

For example...

In fixing my low back pain, changing total workload on my spine was the lowest hanging fruit.

So I swapped barbell back squats for hack squats and leg press, then did single-leg work when a barbell was on my back.

Remember that loading isn’t just gym-specific. How are you loading the painful area outside of the gym? Consider how often you’re static in the same posture and how that may be loading the problem area.

For me, sitting less and sitting differently helped a lot. I just had to learn how to notice when my back started to get tight so that I could shift positions or stand up to introduce some loading toward different areas (changing my chair helped tremendously).

The trap of falling for the Myth of Symmetry is that it actually prevents you from solving your problem with the big rocks first: how much and how often you’re loading the area.

So that I’m clear: I’m not suggesting that asymmetry can’t be related to the cause of pain, or that asymmetry is an inherently good thing either—I’m suggesting that trying to figure out the root cause of pain is a path that leads nowhere good, even if it gives a coach—or you—a sense of confidence about what to do.

This sense of confidence is always to some degree false and therefore will get in the way of intelligent decision-making.

If it’s an exercise-specific pain, altering the technique you use or the exercise you select is a great starting point.

If you have a left-sided shoulder problem that only occurs on two-arm pull-downs and rows, for example, try doing single-arm work for a while instead (I did this for a while back when I had a shoulder issue and when I went back to 2-arm stuff, it felt great).

So what’s the takeaway?

Resist diagnosis. Resist blaming the appearance of things. You don’t need to blame or identify anything to understand what the next smart step is.

Here’s an experiment to run:

• Next time you have a pain, notice your desire to identify exactly what’s wrong.
• Ask what this desire to identify what’s wrong really comes from.
• Without diagnosing yourself, write down 5 different things you could do to address the problem you have in this moment.