I developed my physique—and am still working on it—off the back of 22 years of playing rugby. I suffered all kinds of injuries, including a torn ankle ligament, a prolapsed disk, and shoulder reconstruction, so when I started bodybuilding, my body was slightly dysfunctional. The reason I’m telling you this is that if I can grow and balance out my physique, so can you!!!
One body part I always struggled with is the chest. It’s by no means where I want it to be, but it’s a million miles from where it was. What’s interesting to note is that, just like many of you, I’d tried nearly every tip in the book. So why didn’t they work?
When it comes to training and building muscle, most people focus on exercise choice, reps, load, sets, and rest. But if these variables were always the answer, why isn’t everyone walking around with an oak-like chest, boulders for shoulders, and legs like Tom Platz’s? What many people fail to understand is the importance of biomechanics, and how different we all are.
We are structures built of muscles, bones, tendons, and ligaments. The goals of bodybuilding should never be to move a weight from point A to point B. If it is, your main focus is simply what’s happening to the dumbbell, cable, or barbell. Your primary focus should always be working the muscle, and what’s happening to it throughout the entire range of motion during an exercise. It wasn’t until I took a step back and started to assess my own mechanics and muscles that my body really began to develop.
Now, I’m not expecting you to start reading anatomy books before you go to bed, but I do want you to appreciate your muscles a bit more. So for the rest of this article, I’m going to share some of the main areas I focus on as a coach when I am helping others develop weaker body parts.
So keep in mind that when developing lagging body parts goes way deeper than manipulating calories and reps and sets. It comes down to how you execute each and every exercise. Training becomes so much more rewarding when you pay attention to your muscles and their function rather than simply shifting weights.
This is one of the main issues holding back most lifters with weak body parts. Rarely do I meet someone with a lagging body part who doesn’t have poor posture. To have balanced posture, your muscular structure needs to be balanced and strong from front to back.
Weak muscles create instability, and when they’re placed under tension, overactive or stronger muscle groups take over. Rounded shoulders, which are a common example, create a lot of instability. You end up placing more tension on your shoulders and triceps when you bench- press rather than on your chest.
You can change your setup all you like, but if you’re unstable it won’t make any difference. You need to work on strengthening the muscles that help stabilize your scapula and support thoracic extension (lower& traps, thoracic extensors, and rhomboids). Not only will this improve your posture, it will also enable you to press from a more stable base and more tension will be felt where it should—on the pectorals.
Posture isn’t corrected by standing better; it’s a sign that something is weak and needs to be strengthened.
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Per Bernal / M+F Magazine
Train Through a Full Range of Motion
I doubt you have spent much time recently looking at anatomy books, so let me share something with you. Muscles have an origin and an insertion. By that I mean at each end they attach to the bone with tendons. Muscles have a fully lengthened range— think of the biceps when your arm is fully stretched out—and a fully contracted range—think of the biceps when you show off your guns. To fully develop a muscle, you need to train it through its entire range.
But most people aren’t prepared to lift a weight appropriate for their strength. There will always be parts of any movement where you’re weaker. If you learn to train where you’re weaker first, you will grow a lot quicker. However, because it’s easier to throw a weight past the hard parts of a lift, this is what most people do, and their physiques suffer for it.
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vm / Getty
Improve Your Muscle Control
You should always be in control of the load you’re lifting. Yet walk into most gyms and you immediately see weights being thrown around with little control. To grow, you need to stimulate as much of the muscle as possible, which means learning to lift with control. From the moment you move a joint, you need to be in control of the muscle you’re training. You need to remain in control all the way to full contraction, then at every part of the lowering (or eccentric) portion of the lift. This is where a training partner is helpful because he or she can keep an eye on the lift from start to finish.
I’m sure it will dent your ego to be seen lifting 50% of what you normally do, but you have to remember you’re in the gym to change your body and nothing else. You also have to remember that you’ve remained the same for long enough, so what you’re currently doing isn’t working.
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Per Bernal
Know Your Active Range of Movement
Training beyond the point at which you have control of a muscle could cause injury as well as turn off the working muscle. You must learn the range you can control a load through and remain within it. Go beyond it and other muscle groups kick in.
For instance, think of the bench press. You lower the bar and feel your pecs working until the bar gets about two inches from your chest, then you suddenly feel your shoulders start to round and lose tension in your chest. At this point, the load has switched to your shoulders, traps, and triceps. This doesn’t work the chest and leaves your shoulders open to injury, particularly rotator cuff pain.
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Edgar Artiga
Learn to Initiate
If I told you it’s important to start an exercise with the muscle you intend to work, you’d assure me you do. However, consider my third point about muscle control you have a fully lengthened and fully shortened range of a muscle. You need to focus on developing the entire length.
When I ask someone to initiate with a working muscle, I mean he or she should contract it at the extremity before even starting the lift, which ensures the person fires up the muscle he or she wants to develop.
Think about a dumbbell biceps curl. At the fully stretched position, most swing the dumbbell up for the first two inches. What they should do is contract the muscle in this fully stretched position, which is actually very hard. But if you don’t initiate with the working muscle, you allow other muscles to do the lift. You also miss the chance to develop muscle tissue at the extremes of the range of movement.
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skynesher / Getty
Know When to Stop
Training a weak muscle frequently is popular and rightly so—it works. But there is no point training a body part more than once a week if you’re not stimulating it in the right areas. If you can’t follow all the points in this article, you will derive little benefit from just increasing training frequency. A weaker muscle group can be trained more than once a week. But you need to train it only to the point of fatigue. Let’s say you stick to all the principles in this article and you get nine sets into chest and you’re toast. This is when you should stop.
Don’t push on and do poor reps just to add volume. Leave the workout at nine intense and focused sets, then come back in 48 hours and do the same again. Instead of busting out 18 sets, with 50% poor quality, in one chest session, split the volume into two perfect sessions. A muscle will grow if it’s stimulated correctly, so focus only on precise execution.
