Aspects for balancing power output on the plurality of antennas for the transmission of a transport block are disclosed. In accordance with the present disclosure, a transmitter may balance the power output on a plurality of transmit antennas in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system by having a precoded data block bypass a virtual antenna mapping of the overhead channels (e.g., control channels). Additionally or alternatively, the transmitter may balance the power output on the plurality of transmit antennas by applying an inverse mapping parameter during the precoding process to the transport block to generate a plurality of inverse mapped precoded data blocks. In some examples, the inverse mapping parameter may be an inverse of the mapping parameter. Thus, in accordance with the present disclosure, precoding a transport block may include selecting a precoding weight for each of the plurality of antennas from an unrestricted precoding weight set.