Arnold Schwarzenegger’s unilateral dumbbell workout builds serious strength and bulletproofs your whole body

If you’re looking to build balanced full-body strength, whilst minimising your risk of injury, then you can’t skip unilateral (single limb) exercises. The only thing is, training your body one side at a time often takes longer so, in his recent Pump Club Newsletter, Arnold Schwarzenegger has put together a full-body unilateral workout using just dumbbells that you can smash through in 35 minutes.

“This workout pairs upper and lower body unilateral moves into supersets, giving you double the benefit: balanced strength and efficient training,” Arnold says. “By the end, you’ll feel stronger, steadier, and more in tune with how your body moves.” Sounds good to us! Check out the workout below.

The workout

For this workout, perform the first superset – so both exercises in the pair back-to-back with no rest in between – then rest for 90-120 seconds. Repeat the superset two more times, then move onto the next one and follow the same structure, then that’s you done. Here are your supersets:

Superset 1

• Single-arm dumbbell press – 8-10 reps per arm
• Bulgarian split squat – 8-10 reps per leg

Superset 2

• Single-arm dumbbell row 10-12 reps per arm
• Single-leg Romanian deadlift 8-10 reps per leg

Superset 3

• Single-arm overhead press – 6-8 reps
• Skater squat or front-foot elevated single-leg squat – 6-8 reps per leg

Remember, you don't have to do unilateral exercises all the time, but you should sprinkle some into your training. Now that you have trained your limbs individually, here's another full-body workout from the Austrian Oak, that you can do later in the week. All you'll need is dumbbells and this time you've got the best of both worlds: bilateral and unilateral.