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The Strength Training Anatomy Workout II
Building Strength and Power with Free Weights and Machines
by Frederic Delavier and Michael Gundill
Series: Anatomy
352 Pages
The anatomy of strength, size, and definition!
Over 1 million readers have turned to Strength Training Anatomy for the most effective exercises in strength training. Now put those exercises to work for you with The Strength Training Anatomy Workout, Volume II.
Over 500 full-color photos and 485 full-color illustrations allow you to go inside 60 exercises, 19 stretches, and 9 programmed workouts to see how muscles interact with surrounding joints and skeletal structures and how variations, progressions, and sequencing can affect muscle recruitment, the underlying structures, and ultimately the results.
The Strength Training Anatomy Workout, Volume II, is your guide to serious muscle development. Inside you’ll learn the best exercises for building up and strengthening each muscle; how to determine weights, repetitions, and frequency; and strategies for accelerating recovery.
The Strength Training Anatomy Workout, Volume II, includes proven programming for adding lean muscle mass, improving strength, and increasing power. Targeted workouts allow you to focus on specific muscle groups such as such as chest, biceps, triceps, quads, and core. It’s all here and in all the stunning detail that only Frédéric Delavier can provide!
The former editor in chief of PowerMag in France, author and illustrator Frédéric Delavier is a journalist for Le Monde du Muscle and a contributor to Men’s Health Germany and several other strength publications. His previous publication, Strength Training Anatomy, has sold more than 1 million copies.
PART 1
NEW GOALS TO HELP YOU KEEP GROWING
Five Factors That Stimulate Muscle Growth
Free Weights or Machines: How to Make the Right Choice
Compound or Isolation Exercises?
How Can You Strengthen a Weak Area?
Changing Motor Behavior
Advanced Techniques for Increasing the Intensity
TNT for Explosive Muscle Growth
Adjusting the Speed of Your Repetitions
The Best Bodybuilders Train Explosively
A Physiological Dilemma: Should You Slow Down the Negative Phase?
When the Negative Phase Is Not Accentuated
Potentiation
Continuous Tension or Full Range of Motion?
Burn
Manipulate Your Genetics Using Sets of 100 Reps
How to Improve Your Mind–Muscle Connection
Recovery: An Increasingly Limiting Factor
Muscle Soreness
Learn to Manage Your Ability to Recover
Strategies to Accelerate Recovery
Segmenting Muscles So You Can Dominate Them
Dealing With Injuries
Optimizing Your Strength by Holding Your Breath
Paying Attention to Head Position
Protective Equipment
PART 2
EXERCISES FOR THE MAIN MUSCLE GROUPS
Get Bigger Shoulders
Shoulder Exercises
Develop a Complete Back
Back Exercises
Latissimus Dorsi Exercises
Do Not Neglect the Infraspinatus
Infraspinatus Exercises
Build Impressive Trapezius Muscles
Trapezius Exercises
Develop Strong Lumbar Muscles to Protect Your Back
Exercises for the Lumbar Region
Create Balance in Your Chest
Chest Exercises
Build Your Biceps Quickly
Biceps Exercises
Attain More Developed Forearms
Forearm Exercises
Develop Impressive Triceps
Triceps Exercises
Take Steps Toward Massive Quadriceps
Quadriceps Exercises
Bring Your Hamstrings up to Speed
Hamstring Exercises
Develop the Calves Evenly
Calf Exercises
Chisel Your Abdominal Muscles
Abdominal Exercises
PART 3
WORKOUT PROGRAMS
Beginner Program for Putting on Muscle Quickly—2 Days per Week
Beginner Program for Putting on Muscle Quickly—3 Days per Week
Advanced Program—4 Days per Week
Advanced Program—5 Days per Week
Programs for Building Up Weak Areas
Frédéric Delavier is a gifted artist with an exceptional knowledge of human anatomy. He studied morphology and anatomy for five years at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and studied dissection for three years at the Paris Faculté de Médecine.
The former editor in chief of the French magazine PowerMag, Delavier is currently a journalist for the French magazine Le Monde du Muscle and a contributor to several other muscle publications, including Men's Health Germany. He is the author of the best-selling Strength Training Anatomy and Women’s Strength Training Anatomy.
Delavier won the French powerlifting title in 1988 and makes annual presentations on the sport applications of biomechanics at conferences in Switzerland. His teaching efforts have earned him the Grand Prix de Techniques et de Pédagogie Sportive. Delavier lives in Paris, France.
Michael Gundill, MBA, has written 13 books on strength training, sport nutrition, and health. His books have been translated into multiple languages, and he has written over 500 articles for bodybuilding and fitness magazines worldwide, including Iron Man and Dirty Dieting. In 1998 he won the Article of the Year award at the Fourth Academy of Bodybuilding Fitness & Sports Awards in California.
Gundill started weightlifting in 1983 in order to improve his rowing performances. Most of his training years were spent completing specific lifting programs in his home. As he gained muscle and refined his program, he began to learn more about physiology, anatomy, and biomechanics and started studying those subjects in medical journals. Since 1995 he has been writing about his discoveries in various bodybuilding and fitness magazines all over the world.
How Can You Strengthen a Weak Area?
Everyone has some muscles that do not develop as easily as other muscles.
How Can You Strengthen a Weak Area?
Everyone has some muscles that do not develop as easily as other muscles. When faced with a weak area that is resisting growth, many athletes get discouraged and say that they have tried everything without success. But do you think that they have actually tried everything? To avoid this negative attitude, remember that there is always something you can do to build up a weak area. You can always find new combinations and new techniques to try.
Classic Strategies for Building Up Weak Areas
As mentioned, we all have muscles that respond well to training—and other muscles that do not. To balance out your physique, you need to attack weak areas head on. Here are the classic strategies for building up a weak area:
- Working the delayed muscle first at the beginning of a workout (when you have the most energy and are most focused)
- Doing more sets
- Trying to increase the weight
More Radical Methods
Often, these classic techniques prove inadequate because they do not attack the problem at its root. They can help if the development gap is small, but they do not allow you to build up a muscle that is truly delayed. If you are faced with hypertrophy disparities that affect your muscles, it is better to adopt more radical measures. Above all, building up a weak area requires a good understanding of its causes.
True and False Work Areas
You may experience two kinds of weak areas: true and false.
- A false weak area is a muscle group that is less developed than other muscles because of ineffective training. The lack of volume in a muscle group can be explained by a lack of training or by workouts done in a rush or irregularly. This is often the case for the calves or the thighs. In general, correcting this kind of underdevelopment is relatively easy if you train the muscle regularly and intensely.
- A true weak area is a muscle that does not get bigger despite serious work. We will be focusing on this kind of weak area.
What Causes a True Weak Area?
In theory, muscles should all develop at the same speed, because the hormones and nutrients responsible for anabolism are found in equal concentrations in every muscle. But in reality, muscle growth is influenced more by localized physiological changes than by overall anabolism.
Root of the Problem
True weak areas are caused by three main factors:
- Genetics
- Athletic history
- Difficulties with muscle recruitment
GENETICS
Genetics influences the structure of your strong and weak areas in five ways:
UPPER BODY VERSUS LOWER BODY
Because of genetic factors, we can divide the body into two parts. Some people have an easier time developing the upper-body muscles, while others find it easier to develop the lower-body muscles. People rarely have perfect harmony between the upper and lower body. Even people who seem to have a balanced physique will always have an easier time with either the upper- or lower-body muscles. This is a strong tendency that few people can escape.
GENETIC ASYMMETRY
We are not symmetrical. Some muscles are always more developed on one side of the body than on the other side.
Do not worry if you discover that one of your arms is bigger than the other. The difference is sometimes a fraction of an inch, and sometimes half an inch. Our skeletons are not perfectly symmetrical either. For example, one collarbone might be bigger than the other. This lack of symmetry changes the lever in all upper-body exercises, particularly exercises for the shoulders, chest, and back. Naturally, this will affect strength and will therefore affect muscle development. Skeletal asymmetry may also be at the root of injuries, especially when performing exercises with a long bar.
Short Muscles, Long Muscles
The length of a muscle is one of the primary factors determining how much it can develop. The longer a muscle is (that is, the farther it runs from its insertion points), the easier it is to build the muscle.
On the contrary, the shorter a muscle is, the more difficult it is to develop. For example, muscle length can vary with the calves, which are perched high up on the tibia, or the biceps, which end far away from the forearm. Unfortunately, because muscle length is determined genetically, you cannot lengthen a muscle.
Fibrous Density and Development
The more fibers a muscle has, the bigger it is, even without strength training. During exercise, a dense muscle will react better than the same muscle with fewer fibers. Fortunately, the number of muscle fibers can be increased using these methods:
> Traumatic training strategies such as accentuated negatives.
> Nutritional supplements such as
whey protein, leucine, and creatine. When used just after each workout, these supplements can stimulate the manufacture of new satellite cells. As you continue exercising, these new cells transform into muscle fibers.
Difficulty With Muscle Pump
A direct relationship exists between a muscle's capacity to get pumped during exercise and how fast the muscle grows. The more a muscle swells during a set, the more quickly the muscle will grow. Muscles that have difficulty filling with blood when you work them will always lag behind in development. You can improve this factor by using long sets.
Athletic History
You have the power to influence your genetics. If you played sports when you were younger, the muscles that you used most often in those sports will be the easiest to develop through strength training.
For example, if you did a lot of push-ups when you were young, you will be able to build your chest and triceps faster than average when you start strength train-ing. Having an athletic history helps you become successful in strength training.
If you never played a sport, or if your sport did not precondition all of your muscles, you can use sets of 100 reps to compensate for the absence of this fundamental work.
Difficulty With Muscle Recruitment
Weak areas are generally muscles that you have difficulty feeling and, therefore, recruiting during exercise. This difficulty can be explained by three phenomena:
Blindly Following Dogma
Beware of the many deeply rooted beliefs about muscle recruitment in strength training. For example, one such belief is that the bench press is only a chest exercise. Another belief is that the more weight you push during the press, the larger your chest muscles will become. For lifters who have good chest muscles, these two hypotheses prove correct. But these same beliefs are also the cause of many weak chests.
How many people who strength train spend time learning how to recruit their chest muscles as much as possible during the bench press? Generally, lift-ers just try to use heavier and heav-ier weights in the hope that they will finally be able to build the chest they want. Unfortunately, this tactic does not always work, and it becomes a waste of time. This is true not only for the bench press but also for other compound exercises such as the squat (for building the quadriceps) and rowing or pulling (for building your back). Just because an exercise is supposed to work the upper pectoralis muscle or the brachialis does not mean that the muscle you are targeting will be automatically recruited.
Intermuscular Competition
A recruitment competition takes place among muscles. In a compound exercise such as the bench press—which recruits the arms, the shoulders, and the chest—the most developed muscles are always recruited first. For example, a person who has strong arms or strong shoulders will overrecruit them during the press portion of the exercise, to the detriment of the chest muscles.
Common Competitions Between Muscles
>Powerful arms could prevent the growth of the chest, the shoulders, and the back.
>Big forearms can interrupt the development of the biceps.
>A strong chest could make it difficult to build up the shoulders.
>Good shoulders are an obstacle to building the chest muscles.
>If the back of the shoulder is very thick, it could interfere with back work.
>Prominent buttocks can restrict the recruitment of the quadriceps and the hamstrings.
Imperfections in Muscle Recruitment
Each repetition, each set, and each workout leave their mark not only on the muscles, but also on the central nervous system.
Taken together, these traces constitute your motor behavior. If the bench press works your shoulders and your chest too much every time you do it, this flawed recruitment becomes more deeply ingrained. This will aggravate the problem instead of resolving it.
Read more from The Strength Training Anatomy Workout, Volume II by Frederic Delavier and Michael Gundill.
How to Dominate Your Muscles by Segmenting Them
You need to know whether each one of your muscles is polyarticular or monoarticular. To understand the difference, consider the example of the brachialis and the biceps.
Segmenting Muscles So You Can Dominate Them
You need to know whether each one of your muscles is polyarticular or monoarticular. To understand the difference, consider the example of the brachialis and the biceps:
>The brachialis is monoarticular, because it attaches to the forearm and the humerus (arm bone): It only covers a single joint.
>The biceps is polyarticular, because it attaches to the shoulder and the forearm (not to the humerus): It covers two joints.
To separate the various functions of polyarticular muscles, we can focus on the length-tension relationship. We will have to divide monoarticular groups in a more artificial manner.
The Length-Tension Relationship
The tension (strength) of a muscle is not uniform. When a muscle is stretched to the extreme, it has very little strength. The same thing happens when a muscle is shortened to its maximum. We can conclude that somewhere between these two extremes is the point where a muscle has the best chance to express its strength. So each muscle has an optimal length at which it can mobilize its maximum power. The farther you stretch the muscle from its optimal length (either by stretching or by contracting), the less effective it will be. This means that you will not be able to recruit it and contract it with power.
The concept of the length-tension relationship might seem abstract, but you must understand it when you are working polyarticular muscles such as the biceps, triceps, hamstrings, and calves.
Segmenting the Biceps
The biceps is made up of two heads (parts). With the strategy of segmentation, the idea is to separate the workouts for these two heads so that you work one head while the other head is recovering, and vice versa. This way, you can work the biceps more often, despite an incomplete recovery.
In practice, when you push your elbow toward the back, the following occurs:
>The long head of the biceps (outer part) is placed in a favorable length-tension position.
> The short head of the biceps (inner part) is placed in an unfavorable length-tension position.
result:The long head takes control, leav-ing the short head less able to contract. The benchmark exercise here is an incline curl done on a bench (as flat as possible) using a dumbbell.
However, when the elbow is in front of the body, the following occurs:
>The short head of the biceps works first.
>The long head has more difficulty getting involved.
This is the case with most biceps machines and Scott curl benches. So, by changing the stretch in your biceps, you change each head's ability to participate in the movement. When you work out, you can do either of these:
>Work the biceps from both angles.
>Work the biceps from only one angle.
If you are focusing on only one angle, the first workout can target the short head, and the second workout can focus on the long head. For the third workout, begin the cycle again.
Segmenting the Triceps
The long head of the triceps (inner part) is polyarticular. The other two heads are monoarticular. To increase the recruitment of the long head, you need to stretch it, which puts it in a favorable length-
tension position. To do this, you must choose triceps exercises where your arms are placed close to your head. During the next workout, you can accentuate the work of the other two heads by putting your arms alongside your body with your elbows as far back as possible.
Segmenting the Shoulders
Even though the deltoid is monoarticular, this muscle can be divided into three parts:
>The front (anterior)
>The side (lateral or middle)
>The back (posterior)
The first workout, based on presses, will target the front part of the shoulder. The second workout will focus on the back part, and the third will work the side. Then you will begin the cycle again.
Segmenting the Back
In strength training, most people think there are two main categories of back exercises:
>Those that work on size (primarily the latissimus dorsi)
>Those that work on thickness (trape-ius and rhomboids)
This distinction, even though it is very artificial, will work for our purposes. Instead of combining pull-ups and rows in every workout, you can devote the first workout to pull-ups (for size) and leave the rows (targeting thickness) for the next workout.
Segmenting the Chest
The chest can be divided into two sections:
>The upper section
>The lower section
People often try to stimulate both sections every time they work out. However, you should try to concentrate on only one part in each workout. For this segmentation technique to work effectively, you must have already learned how to isolate the upper part of your chest. The easiest way to learn this is to perform light cable work that targets the section of the pectoralis major nearest to the clavicle.
Segmenting the Abdominal Muscles
Segmenting the abdominal muscles is easy. You need to work these sections:
>The upper section
>The lower section
Therefore, alternating between specific exercises for each region is very simple.
Segmenting the Calves
The gastrocnemius muscles are polyarticular, but the soleus is monoarticular. If you work from a seated position, you make your gastrocnemius muscles soft, and they can no longer contract.
However, the straighter your legs are, the more the gastrocnemius muscles will be stimulated. Ideally, you should lean forward (as in donkey calf raises or leg presses) to find the ideal length-tension position for the gastrocnemius muscles. You can do one workout with straight legs and another workout while seated with bent legs.
Segmenting the Hamstrings
The hamstrings have two functions:
>To flex the leg (e.g., in leg curls)
>To straighten the torso (e.g., in a deadlift)
Focus on the first function during one workout, and then focus on the second function during the next workout.
Segmenting the Quadriceps
Our strategy of dividing muscles into parts does not work here because it is difficult to divide up quadriceps exercises. Instead, you can use a strategy of alternating between using machines and using a bar. This will allow you to rotate through three main exercises:
>Squats
>Leg presses
>Hack squats
Instead of using two or three exercises per workout, you should concentrate on only one exercise.
Read more from The Strength Training Anatomy Workout, Volume II by Frederic Delavier and Michael Gundill.
How to Accelerate Recovery
Our ability to tire out our muscles, joints, nervous system, and endocrine system is limitless.
Strategies to Accelerate Recovery
Our ability to tire out our muscles, joints, nervous system, and endocrine system is limitless. We just have to keep working out more. However, our ability to recover is extremely limited. Faced with this dilemma—and keeping in mind that recovery is eternal—we can choose to passively let nature take its course, or we can take control of the situation.
If you want to take charge, you can use these two strategies:
>Accelerate the regenerative process by using reminders.
>Get a head start on recovery.
Why Does Recovery Take So Long?
The length of recovery is the result of the rapid decrease in anabolism after a workout. Scientific studies show the following: In the 8 hours after a workout, recovery is very efficient; however, after that point, recovery slows down, and the speed of regeneration decreases exponentially. For example, if 48 hours are required for recovery after a given workout,
>85 percent of your physical capacity is recovered in 24 hours, and
>the other 15 percent requires an additional 24 hours.
If the speed of recovery during those first few hours were maintained, only 4 additional hours would be needed for a complete recovery. Unfortunately, we have to struggle with the inefficiency of the regenerative process; this process slows down too early, before completing its masterpiece.
The Concept of Reminders
We must find ways to maintain the recov-ery mechanisms until the body has completely recovered. The first way is to exploit the benefits of nontraumatic “reminders.”
Reminder Sets
Reminder sets involve performing just a few sets of an exercise to lightly work a recovering muscle. These sets should be long and light. Reminder sets are the best way to reenergize the anabolism process when it is slowing down. Instead of waiting for the complete recovery of a muscle group, you will gently retrain that muscle group during the recovery phase. If this work is truly not traumatic, there will be no negative effects. However, if you traumatize the muscle again, your recovery will be even further delayed. Sayers et al. (2000. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise 32(9):1587-92) showed that in the days after a very traumatic biceps workout, doing a light set of 50 repetitions daily accelerated recovery speed by 24 percent. Here are a few simple rules to follow when you want to rework a muscle without traumatizing it:
- Choose an isolation exercise rather than a compound exercise. This enables you to better focus your efforts.
- Opt for machines or cables so that you can avoid free weights. Free weights do not isolate muscles as well and can cause more trauma.
- Use a light weight and do a high number of repetitions. Your goal is to bring as much blood as possible to the muscle.
- Be very careful to use proper form while performing the exercise.
- Do no more than three sets with low intensity.
Reminder Stretching
Stretching can also strengthen waning anabolism. The advantage of stretching is that it is less tiring than a reminder set; the disadvantage is that it is also less productive. Ideally, you could combine stretching and reminder sets for maximum effectiveness. But do not go overboard either! Beyond a certain point, too many reminder sets will fatigue the muscle, not help it. Two to four sets of static stretches, held for 15 to 20 seconds, can be a good foundation to work with.
How Can You Integrate Recovery Reminders?
The arsenal of recovery can be implemented 24 to 48 hours after you have worked the muscle involved. Reminder sets can be included at the beginning of your regular training (as a warm-up) or at the end (as a cool-down). Stretches can be done both before and after a workout.
Get a Head Start On Recovery
Another strategy enables you to work a muscle again even if the muscle has not yet fully recovered. This partial-recovery approach allows you to increase the frequency of your workouts for a muscle while avoiding overtraining. It is primarily intended for experienced lifters who are suffering from recovery issues. This tactic involves using a single exercise for the muscle in each workout and alternating exercises every workout.
Read more from The Strength Training Anatomy Workout, Volume II by Frederic Delavier and Michael Gundill.
How Can You Strengthen a Weak Area?
Everyone has some muscles that do not develop as easily as other muscles.
How Can You Strengthen a Weak Area?
Everyone has some muscles that do not develop as easily as other muscles. When faced with a weak area that is resisting growth, many athletes get discouraged and say that they have tried everything without success. But do you think that they have actually tried everything? To avoid this negative attitude, remember that there is always something you can do to build up a weak area. You can always find new combinations and new techniques to try.
Classic Strategies for Building Up Weak Areas
As mentioned, we all have muscles that respond well to training—and other muscles that do not. To balance out your physique, you need to attack weak areas head on. Here are the classic strategies for building up a weak area:
- Working the delayed muscle first at the beginning of a workout (when you have the most energy and are most focused)
- Doing more sets
- Trying to increase the weight
More Radical Methods
Often, these classic techniques prove inadequate because they do not attack the problem at its root. They can help if the development gap is small, but they do not allow you to build up a muscle that is truly delayed. If you are faced with hypertrophy disparities that affect your muscles, it is better to adopt more radical measures. Above all, building up a weak area requires a good understanding of its causes.
True and False Work Areas
You may experience two kinds of weak areas: true and false.
- A false weak area is a muscle group that is less developed than other muscles because of ineffective training. The lack of volume in a muscle group can be explained by a lack of training or by workouts done in a rush or irregularly. This is often the case for the calves or the thighs. In general, correcting this kind of underdevelopment is relatively easy if you train the muscle regularly and intensely.
- A true weak area is a muscle that does not get bigger despite serious work. We will be focusing on this kind of weak area.
What Causes a True Weak Area?
In theory, muscles should all develop at the same speed, because the hormones and nutrients responsible for anabolism are found in equal concentrations in every muscle. But in reality, muscle growth is influenced more by localized physiological changes than by overall anabolism.
Root of the Problem
True weak areas are caused by three main factors:
- Genetics
- Athletic history
- Difficulties with muscle recruitment
GENETICS
Genetics influences the structure of your strong and weak areas in five ways:
UPPER BODY VERSUS LOWER BODY
Because of genetic factors, we can divide the body into two parts. Some people have an easier time developing the upper-body muscles, while others find it easier to develop the lower-body muscles. People rarely have perfect harmony between the upper and lower body. Even people who seem to have a balanced physique will always have an easier time with either the upper- or lower-body muscles. This is a strong tendency that few people can escape.
GENETIC ASYMMETRY
We are not symmetrical. Some muscles are always more developed on one side of the body than on the other side.
Do not worry if you discover that one of your arms is bigger than the other. The difference is sometimes a fraction of an inch, and sometimes half an inch. Our skeletons are not perfectly symmetrical either. For example, one collarbone might be bigger than the other. This lack of symmetry changes the lever in all upper-body exercises, particularly exercises for the shoulders, chest, and back. Naturally, this will affect strength and will therefore affect muscle development. Skeletal asymmetry may also be at the root of injuries, especially when performing exercises with a long bar.
Short Muscles, Long Muscles
The length of a muscle is one of the primary factors determining how much it can develop. The longer a muscle is (that is, the farther it runs from its insertion points), the easier it is to build the muscle.
On the contrary, the shorter a muscle is, the more difficult it is to develop. For example, muscle length can vary with the calves, which are perched high up on the tibia, or the biceps, which end far away from the forearm. Unfortunately, because muscle length is determined genetically, you cannot lengthen a muscle.
Fibrous Density and Development
The more fibers a muscle has, the bigger it is, even without strength training. During exercise, a dense muscle will react better than the same muscle with fewer fibers. Fortunately, the number of muscle fibers can be increased using these methods:
> Traumatic training strategies such as accentuated negatives.
> Nutritional supplements such as
whey protein, leucine, and creatine. When used just after each workout, these supplements can stimulate the manufacture of new satellite cells. As you continue exercising, these new cells transform into muscle fibers.
Difficulty With Muscle Pump
A direct relationship exists between a muscle's capacity to get pumped during exercise and how fast the muscle grows. The more a muscle swells during a set, the more quickly the muscle will grow. Muscles that have difficulty filling with blood when you work them will always lag behind in development. You can improve this factor by using long sets.
Athletic History
You have the power to influence your genetics. If you played sports when you were younger, the muscles that you used most often in those sports will be the easiest to develop through strength training.
For example, if you did a lot of push-ups when you were young, you will be able to build your chest and triceps faster than average when you start strength train-ing. Having an athletic history helps you become successful in strength training.
If you never played a sport, or if your sport did not precondition all of your muscles, you can use sets of 100 reps to compensate for the absence of this fundamental work.
Difficulty With Muscle Recruitment
Weak areas are generally muscles that you have difficulty feeling and, therefore, recruiting during exercise. This difficulty can be explained by three phenomena:
Blindly Following Dogma
Beware of the many deeply rooted beliefs about muscle recruitment in strength training. For example, one such belief is that the bench press is only a chest exercise. Another belief is that the more weight you push during the press, the larger your chest muscles will become. For lifters who have good chest muscles, these two hypotheses prove correct. But these same beliefs are also the cause of many weak chests.
How many people who strength train spend time learning how to recruit their chest muscles as much as possible during the bench press? Generally, lift-ers just try to use heavier and heav-ier weights in the hope that they will finally be able to build the chest they want. Unfortunately, this tactic does not always work, and it becomes a waste of time. This is true not only for the bench press but also for other compound exercises such as the squat (for building the quadriceps) and rowing or pulling (for building your back). Just because an exercise is supposed to work the upper pectoralis muscle or the brachialis does not mean that the muscle you are targeting will be automatically recruited.
Intermuscular Competition
A recruitment competition takes place among muscles. In a compound exercise such as the bench press—which recruits the arms, the shoulders, and the chest—the most developed muscles are always recruited first. For example, a person who has strong arms or strong shoulders will overrecruit them during the press portion of the exercise, to the detriment of the chest muscles.
Common Competitions Between Muscles
>Powerful arms could prevent the growth of the chest, the shoulders, and the back.
>Big forearms can interrupt the development of the biceps.
>A strong chest could make it difficult to build up the shoulders.
>Good shoulders are an obstacle to building the chest muscles.
>If the back of the shoulder is very thick, it could interfere with back work.
>Prominent buttocks can restrict the recruitment of the quadriceps and the hamstrings.
Imperfections in Muscle Recruitment
Each repetition, each set, and each workout leave their mark not only on the muscles, but also on the central nervous system.
Taken together, these traces constitute your motor behavior. If the bench press works your shoulders and your chest too much every time you do it, this flawed recruitment becomes more deeply ingrained. This will aggravate the problem instead of resolving it.
Read more from The Strength Training Anatomy Workout, Volume II by Frederic Delavier and Michael Gundill.
How to Dominate Your Muscles by Segmenting Them
You need to know whether each one of your muscles is polyarticular or monoarticular. To understand the difference, consider the example of the brachialis and the biceps.
Segmenting Muscles So You Can Dominate Them
You need to know whether each one of your muscles is polyarticular or monoarticular. To understand the difference, consider the example of the brachialis and the biceps:
>The brachialis is monoarticular, because it attaches to the forearm and the humerus (arm bone): It only covers a single joint.
>The biceps is polyarticular, because it attaches to the shoulder and the forearm (not to the humerus): It covers two joints.
To separate the various functions of polyarticular muscles, we can focus on the length-tension relationship. We will have to divide monoarticular groups in a more artificial manner.
The Length-Tension Relationship
The tension (strength) of a muscle is not uniform. When a muscle is stretched to the extreme, it has very little strength. The same thing happens when a muscle is shortened to its maximum. We can conclude that somewhere between these two extremes is the point where a muscle has the best chance to express its strength. So each muscle has an optimal length at which it can mobilize its maximum power. The farther you stretch the muscle from its optimal length (either by stretching or by contracting), the less effective it will be. This means that you will not be able to recruit it and contract it with power.
The concept of the length-tension relationship might seem abstract, but you must understand it when you are working polyarticular muscles such as the biceps, triceps, hamstrings, and calves.
Segmenting the Biceps
The biceps is made up of two heads (parts). With the strategy of segmentation, the idea is to separate the workouts for these two heads so that you work one head while the other head is recovering, and vice versa. This way, you can work the biceps more often, despite an incomplete recovery.
In practice, when you push your elbow toward the back, the following occurs:
>The long head of the biceps (outer part) is placed in a favorable length-tension position.
> The short head of the biceps (inner part) is placed in an unfavorable length-tension position.
result:The long head takes control, leav-ing the short head less able to contract. The benchmark exercise here is an incline curl done on a bench (as flat as possible) using a dumbbell.
However, when the elbow is in front of the body, the following occurs:
>The short head of the biceps works first.
>The long head has more difficulty getting involved.
This is the case with most biceps machines and Scott curl benches. So, by changing the stretch in your biceps, you change each head's ability to participate in the movement. When you work out, you can do either of these:
>Work the biceps from both angles.
>Work the biceps from only one angle.
If you are focusing on only one angle, the first workout can target the short head, and the second workout can focus on the long head. For the third workout, begin the cycle again.
Segmenting the Triceps
The long head of the triceps (inner part) is polyarticular. The other two heads are monoarticular. To increase the recruitment of the long head, you need to stretch it, which puts it in a favorable length-
tension position. To do this, you must choose triceps exercises where your arms are placed close to your head. During the next workout, you can accentuate the work of the other two heads by putting your arms alongside your body with your elbows as far back as possible.
Segmenting the Shoulders
Even though the deltoid is monoarticular, this muscle can be divided into three parts:
>The front (anterior)
>The side (lateral or middle)
>The back (posterior)
The first workout, based on presses, will target the front part of the shoulder. The second workout will focus on the back part, and the third will work the side. Then you will begin the cycle again.
Segmenting the Back
In strength training, most people think there are two main categories of back exercises:
>Those that work on size (primarily the latissimus dorsi)
>Those that work on thickness (trape-ius and rhomboids)
This distinction, even though it is very artificial, will work for our purposes. Instead of combining pull-ups and rows in every workout, you can devote the first workout to pull-ups (for size) and leave the rows (targeting thickness) for the next workout.
Segmenting the Chest
The chest can be divided into two sections:
>The upper section
>The lower section
People often try to stimulate both sections every time they work out. However, you should try to concentrate on only one part in each workout. For this segmentation technique to work effectively, you must have already learned how to isolate the upper part of your chest. The easiest way to learn this is to perform light cable work that targets the section of the pectoralis major nearest to the clavicle.
Segmenting the Abdominal Muscles
Segmenting the abdominal muscles is easy. You need to work these sections:
>The upper section
>The lower section
Therefore, alternating between specific exercises for each region is very simple.
Segmenting the Calves
The gastrocnemius muscles are polyarticular, but the soleus is monoarticular. If you work from a seated position, you make your gastrocnemius muscles soft, and they can no longer contract.
However, the straighter your legs are, the more the gastrocnemius muscles will be stimulated. Ideally, you should lean forward (as in donkey calf raises or leg presses) to find the ideal length-tension position for the gastrocnemius muscles. You can do one workout with straight legs and another workout while seated with bent legs.
Segmenting the Hamstrings
The hamstrings have two functions:
>To flex the leg (e.g., in leg curls)
>To straighten the torso (e.g., in a deadlift)
Focus on the first function during one workout, and then focus on the second function during the next workout.
Segmenting the Quadriceps
Our strategy of dividing muscles into parts does not work here because it is difficult to divide up quadriceps exercises. Instead, you can use a strategy of alternating between using machines and using a bar. This will allow you to rotate through three main exercises:
>Squats
>Leg presses
>Hack squats
Instead of using two or three exercises per workout, you should concentrate on only one exercise.
Read more from The Strength Training Anatomy Workout, Volume II by Frederic Delavier and Michael Gundill.
How to Accelerate Recovery
Our ability to tire out our muscles, joints, nervous system, and endocrine system is limitless.
Strategies to Accelerate Recovery
Our ability to tire out our muscles, joints, nervous system, and endocrine system is limitless. We just have to keep working out more. However, our ability to recover is extremely limited. Faced with this dilemma—and keeping in mind that recovery is eternal—we can choose to passively let nature take its course, or we can take control of the situation.
If you want to take charge, you can use these two strategies:
>Accelerate the regenerative process by using reminders.
>Get a head start on recovery.
Why Does Recovery Take So Long?
The length of recovery is the result of the rapid decrease in anabolism after a workout. Scientific studies show the following: In the 8 hours after a workout, recovery is very efficient; however, after that point, recovery slows down, and the speed of regeneration decreases exponentially. For example, if 48 hours are required for recovery after a given workout,
>85 percent of your physical capacity is recovered in 24 hours, and
>the other 15 percent requires an additional 24 hours.
If the speed of recovery during those first few hours were maintained, only 4 additional hours would be needed for a complete recovery. Unfortunately, we have to struggle with the inefficiency of the regenerative process; this process slows down too early, before completing its masterpiece.
The Concept of Reminders
We must find ways to maintain the recov-ery mechanisms until the body has completely recovered. The first way is to exploit the benefits of nontraumatic “reminders.”
Reminder Sets
Reminder sets involve performing just a few sets of an exercise to lightly work a recovering muscle. These sets should be long and light. Reminder sets are the best way to reenergize the anabolism process when it is slowing down. Instead of waiting for the complete recovery of a muscle group, you will gently retrain that muscle group during the recovery phase. If this work is truly not traumatic, there will be no negative effects. However, if you traumatize the muscle again, your recovery will be even further delayed. Sayers et al. (2000. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise 32(9):1587-92) showed that in the days after a very traumatic biceps workout, doing a light set of 50 repetitions daily accelerated recovery speed by 24 percent. Here are a few simple rules to follow when you want to rework a muscle without traumatizing it:
- Choose an isolation exercise rather than a compound exercise. This enables you to better focus your efforts.
- Opt for machines or cables so that you can avoid free weights. Free weights do not isolate muscles as well and can cause more trauma.
- Use a light weight and do a high number of repetitions. Your goal is to bring as much blood as possible to the muscle.
- Be very careful to use proper form while performing the exercise.
- Do no more than three sets with low intensity.
Reminder Stretching
Stretching can also strengthen waning anabolism. The advantage of stretching is that it is less tiring than a reminder set; the disadvantage is that it is also less productive. Ideally, you could combine stretching and reminder sets for maximum effectiveness. But do not go overboard either! Beyond a certain point, too many reminder sets will fatigue the muscle, not help it. Two to four sets of static stretches, held for 15 to 20 seconds, can be a good foundation to work with.
How Can You Integrate Recovery Reminders?
The arsenal of recovery can be implemented 24 to 48 hours after you have worked the muscle involved. Reminder sets can be included at the beginning of your regular training (as a warm-up) or at the end (as a cool-down). Stretches can be done both before and after a workout.
Get a Head Start On Recovery
Another strategy enables you to work a muscle again even if the muscle has not yet fully recovered. This partial-recovery approach allows you to increase the frequency of your workouts for a muscle while avoiding overtraining. It is primarily intended for experienced lifters who are suffering from recovery issues. This tactic involves using a single exercise for the muscle in each workout and alternating exercises every workout.
Read more from The Strength Training Anatomy Workout, Volume II by Frederic Delavier and Michael Gundill.
How Can You Strengthen a Weak Area?
Everyone has some muscles that do not develop as easily as other muscles.
How Can You Strengthen a Weak Area?
Everyone has some muscles that do not develop as easily as other muscles. When faced with a weak area that is resisting growth, many athletes get discouraged and say that they have tried everything without success. But do you think that they have actually tried everything? To avoid this negative attitude, remember that there is always something you can do to build up a weak area. You can always find new combinations and new techniques to try.
Classic Strategies for Building Up Weak Areas
As mentioned, we all have muscles that respond well to training—and other muscles that do not. To balance out your physique, you need to attack weak areas head on. Here are the classic strategies for building up a weak area:
- Working the delayed muscle first at the beginning of a workout (when you have the most energy and are most focused)
- Doing more sets
- Trying to increase the weight
More Radical Methods
Often, these classic techniques prove inadequate because they do not attack the problem at its root. They can help if the development gap is small, but they do not allow you to build up a muscle that is truly delayed. If you are faced with hypertrophy disparities that affect your muscles, it is better to adopt more radical measures. Above all, building up a weak area requires a good understanding of its causes.
True and False Work Areas
You may experience two kinds of weak areas: true and false.
- A false weak area is a muscle group that is less developed than other muscles because of ineffective training. The lack of volume in a muscle group can be explained by a lack of training or by workouts done in a rush or irregularly. This is often the case for the calves or the thighs. In general, correcting this kind of underdevelopment is relatively easy if you train the muscle regularly and intensely.
- A true weak area is a muscle that does not get bigger despite serious work. We will be focusing on this kind of weak area.
What Causes a True Weak Area?
In theory, muscles should all develop at the same speed, because the hormones and nutrients responsible for anabolism are found in equal concentrations in every muscle. But in reality, muscle growth is influenced more by localized physiological changes than by overall anabolism.
Root of the Problem
True weak areas are caused by three main factors:
- Genetics
- Athletic history
- Difficulties with muscle recruitment
GENETICS
Genetics influences the structure of your strong and weak areas in five ways:
UPPER BODY VERSUS LOWER BODY
Because of genetic factors, we can divide the body into two parts. Some people have an easier time developing the upper-body muscles, while others find it easier to develop the lower-body muscles. People rarely have perfect harmony between the upper and lower body. Even people who seem to have a balanced physique will always have an easier time with either the upper- or lower-body muscles. This is a strong tendency that few people can escape.
GENETIC ASYMMETRY
We are not symmetrical. Some muscles are always more developed on one side of the body than on the other side.
Do not worry if you discover that one of your arms is bigger than the other. The difference is sometimes a fraction of an inch, and sometimes half an inch. Our skeletons are not perfectly symmetrical either. For example, one collarbone might be bigger than the other. This lack of symmetry changes the lever in all upper-body exercises, particularly exercises for the shoulders, chest, and back. Naturally, this will affect strength and will therefore affect muscle development. Skeletal asymmetry may also be at the root of injuries, especially when performing exercises with a long bar.
Short Muscles, Long Muscles
The length of a muscle is one of the primary factors determining how much it can develop. The longer a muscle is (that is, the farther it runs from its insertion points), the easier it is to build the muscle.
On the contrary, the shorter a muscle is, the more difficult it is to develop. For example, muscle length can vary with the calves, which are perched high up on the tibia, or the biceps, which end far away from the forearm. Unfortunately, because muscle length is determined genetically, you cannot lengthen a muscle.
Fibrous Density and Development
The more fibers a muscle has, the bigger it is, even without strength training. During exercise, a dense muscle will react better than the same muscle with fewer fibers. Fortunately, the number of muscle fibers can be increased using these methods:
> Traumatic training strategies such as accentuated negatives.
> Nutritional supplements such as
whey protein, leucine, and creatine. When used just after each workout, these supplements can stimulate the manufacture of new satellite cells. As you continue exercising, these new cells transform into muscle fibers.
Difficulty With Muscle Pump
A direct relationship exists between a muscle's capacity to get pumped during exercise and how fast the muscle grows. The more a muscle swells during a set, the more quickly the muscle will grow. Muscles that have difficulty filling with blood when you work them will always lag behind in development. You can improve this factor by using long sets.
Athletic History
You have the power to influence your genetics. If you played sports when you were younger, the muscles that you used most often in those sports will be the easiest to develop through strength training.
For example, if you did a lot of push-ups when you were young, you will be able to build your chest and triceps faster than average when you start strength train-ing. Having an athletic history helps you become successful in strength training.
If you never played a sport, or if your sport did not precondition all of your muscles, you can use sets of 100 reps to compensate for the absence of this fundamental work.
Difficulty With Muscle Recruitment
Weak areas are generally muscles that you have difficulty feeling and, therefore, recruiting during exercise. This difficulty can be explained by three phenomena:
Blindly Following Dogma
Beware of the many deeply rooted beliefs about muscle recruitment in strength training. For example, one such belief is that the bench press is only a chest exercise. Another belief is that the more weight you push during the press, the larger your chest muscles will become. For lifters who have good chest muscles, these two hypotheses prove correct. But these same beliefs are also the cause of many weak chests.
How many people who strength train spend time learning how to recruit their chest muscles as much as possible during the bench press? Generally, lift-ers just try to use heavier and heav-ier weights in the hope that they will finally be able to build the chest they want. Unfortunately, this tactic does not always work, and it becomes a waste of time. This is true not only for the bench press but also for other compound exercises such as the squat (for building the quadriceps) and rowing or pulling (for building your back). Just because an exercise is supposed to work the upper pectoralis muscle or the brachialis does not mean that the muscle you are targeting will be automatically recruited.
Intermuscular Competition
A recruitment competition takes place among muscles. In a compound exercise such as the bench press—which recruits the arms, the shoulders, and the chest—the most developed muscles are always recruited first. For example, a person who has strong arms or strong shoulders will overrecruit them during the press portion of the exercise, to the detriment of the chest muscles.
Common Competitions Between Muscles
>Powerful arms could prevent the growth of the chest, the shoulders, and the back.
>Big forearms can interrupt the development of the biceps.
>A strong chest could make it difficult to build up the shoulders.
>Good shoulders are an obstacle to building the chest muscles.
>If the back of the shoulder is very thick, it could interfere with back work.
>Prominent buttocks can restrict the recruitment of the quadriceps and the hamstrings.
Imperfections in Muscle Recruitment
Each repetition, each set, and each workout leave their mark not only on the muscles, but also on the central nervous system.
Taken together, these traces constitute your motor behavior. If the bench press works your shoulders and your chest too much every time you do it, this flawed recruitment becomes more deeply ingrained. This will aggravate the problem instead of resolving it.
Read more from The Strength Training Anatomy Workout, Volume II by Frederic Delavier and Michael Gundill.
How to Dominate Your Muscles by Segmenting Them
You need to know whether each one of your muscles is polyarticular or monoarticular. To understand the difference, consider the example of the brachialis and the biceps.
Segmenting Muscles So You Can Dominate Them
You need to know whether each one of your muscles is polyarticular or monoarticular. To understand the difference, consider the example of the brachialis and the biceps:
>The brachialis is monoarticular, because it attaches to the forearm and the humerus (arm bone): It only covers a single joint.
>The biceps is polyarticular, because it attaches to the shoulder and the forearm (not to the humerus): It covers two joints.
To separate the various functions of polyarticular muscles, we can focus on the length-tension relationship. We will have to divide monoarticular groups in a more artificial manner.
The Length-Tension Relationship
The tension (strength) of a muscle is not uniform. When a muscle is stretched to the extreme, it has very little strength. The same thing happens when a muscle is shortened to its maximum. We can conclude that somewhere between these two extremes is the point where a muscle has the best chance to express its strength. So each muscle has an optimal length at which it can mobilize its maximum power. The farther you stretch the muscle from its optimal length (either by stretching or by contracting), the less effective it will be. This means that you will not be able to recruit it and contract it with power.
The concept of the length-tension relationship might seem abstract, but you must understand it when you are working polyarticular muscles such as the biceps, triceps, hamstrings, and calves.
Segmenting the Biceps
The biceps is made up of two heads (parts). With the strategy of segmentation, the idea is to separate the workouts for these two heads so that you work one head while the other head is recovering, and vice versa. This way, you can work the biceps more often, despite an incomplete recovery.
In practice, when you push your elbow toward the back, the following occurs:
>The long head of the biceps (outer part) is placed in a favorable length-tension position.
> The short head of the biceps (inner part) is placed in an unfavorable length-tension position.
result:The long head takes control, leav-ing the short head less able to contract. The benchmark exercise here is an incline curl done on a bench (as flat as possible) using a dumbbell.
However, when the elbow is in front of the body, the following occurs:
>The short head of the biceps works first.
>The long head has more difficulty getting involved.
This is the case with most biceps machines and Scott curl benches. So, by changing the stretch in your biceps, you change each head's ability to participate in the movement. When you work out, you can do either of these:
>Work the biceps from both angles.
>Work the biceps from only one angle.
If you are focusing on only one angle, the first workout can target the short head, and the second workout can focus on the long head. For the third workout, begin the cycle again.
Segmenting the Triceps
The long head of the triceps (inner part) is polyarticular. The other two heads are monoarticular. To increase the recruitment of the long head, you need to stretch it, which puts it in a favorable length-
tension position. To do this, you must choose triceps exercises where your arms are placed close to your head. During the next workout, you can accentuate the work of the other two heads by putting your arms alongside your body with your elbows as far back as possible.
Segmenting the Shoulders
Even though the deltoid is monoarticular, this muscle can be divided into three parts:
>The front (anterior)
>The side (lateral or middle)
>The back (posterior)
The first workout, based on presses, will target the front part of the shoulder. The second workout will focus on the back part, and the third will work the side. Then you will begin the cycle again.
Segmenting the Back
In strength training, most people think there are two main categories of back exercises:
>Those that work on size (primarily the latissimus dorsi)
>Those that work on thickness (trape-ius and rhomboids)
This distinction, even though it is very artificial, will work for our purposes. Instead of combining pull-ups and rows in every workout, you can devote the first workout to pull-ups (for size) and leave the rows (targeting thickness) for the next workout.
Segmenting the Chest
The chest can be divided into two sections:
>The upper section
>The lower section
People often try to stimulate both sections every time they work out. However, you should try to concentrate on only one part in each workout. For this segmentation technique to work effectively, you must have already learned how to isolate the upper part of your chest. The easiest way to learn this is to perform light cable work that targets the section of the pectoralis major nearest to the clavicle.
Segmenting the Abdominal Muscles
Segmenting the abdominal muscles is easy. You need to work these sections:
>The upper section
>The lower section
Therefore, alternating between specific exercises for each region is very simple.
Segmenting the Calves
The gastrocnemius muscles are polyarticular, but the soleus is monoarticular. If you work from a seated position, you make your gastrocnemius muscles soft, and they can no longer contract.
However, the straighter your legs are, the more the gastrocnemius muscles will be stimulated. Ideally, you should lean forward (as in donkey calf raises or leg presses) to find the ideal length-tension position for the gastrocnemius muscles. You can do one workout with straight legs and another workout while seated with bent legs.
Segmenting the Hamstrings
The hamstrings have two functions:
>To flex the leg (e.g., in leg curls)
>To straighten the torso (e.g., in a deadlift)
Focus on the first function during one workout, and then focus on the second function during the next workout.
Segmenting the Quadriceps
Our strategy of dividing muscles into parts does not work here because it is difficult to divide up quadriceps exercises. Instead, you can use a strategy of alternating between using machines and using a bar. This will allow you to rotate through three main exercises:
>Squats
>Leg presses
>Hack squats
Instead of using two or three exercises per workout, you should concentrate on only one exercise.
Read more from The Strength Training Anatomy Workout, Volume II by Frederic Delavier and Michael Gundill.
How to Accelerate Recovery
Our ability to tire out our muscles, joints, nervous system, and endocrine system is limitless.
Strategies to Accelerate Recovery
Our ability to tire out our muscles, joints, nervous system, and endocrine system is limitless. We just have to keep working out more. However, our ability to recover is extremely limited. Faced with this dilemma—and keeping in mind that recovery is eternal—we can choose to passively let nature take its course, or we can take control of the situation.
If you want to take charge, you can use these two strategies:
>Accelerate the regenerative process by using reminders.
>Get a head start on recovery.
Why Does Recovery Take So Long?
The length of recovery is the result of the rapid decrease in anabolism after a workout. Scientific studies show the following: In the 8 hours after a workout, recovery is very efficient; however, after that point, recovery slows down, and the speed of regeneration decreases exponentially. For example, if 48 hours are required for recovery after a given workout,
>85 percent of your physical capacity is recovered in 24 hours, and
>the other 15 percent requires an additional 24 hours.
If the speed of recovery during those first few hours were maintained, only 4 additional hours would be needed for a complete recovery. Unfortunately, we have to struggle with the inefficiency of the regenerative process; this process slows down too early, before completing its masterpiece.
The Concept of Reminders
We must find ways to maintain the recov-ery mechanisms until the body has completely recovered. The first way is to exploit the benefits of nontraumatic “reminders.”
Reminder Sets
Reminder sets involve performing just a few sets of an exercise to lightly work a recovering muscle. These sets should be long and light. Reminder sets are the best way to reenergize the anabolism process when it is slowing down. Instead of waiting for the complete recovery of a muscle group, you will gently retrain that muscle group during the recovery phase. If this work is truly not traumatic, there will be no negative effects. However, if you traumatize the muscle again, your recovery will be even further delayed. Sayers et al. (2000. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise 32(9):1587-92) showed that in the days after a very traumatic biceps workout, doing a light set of 50 repetitions daily accelerated recovery speed by 24 percent. Here are a few simple rules to follow when you want to rework a muscle without traumatizing it:
- Choose an isolation exercise rather than a compound exercise. This enables you to better focus your efforts.
- Opt for machines or cables so that you can avoid free weights. Free weights do not isolate muscles as well and can cause more trauma.
- Use a light weight and do a high number of repetitions. Your goal is to bring as much blood as possible to the muscle.
- Be very careful to use proper form while performing the exercise.
- Do no more than three sets with low intensity.
Reminder Stretching
Stretching can also strengthen waning anabolism. The advantage of stretching is that it is less tiring than a reminder set; the disadvantage is that it is also less productive. Ideally, you could combine stretching and reminder sets for maximum effectiveness. But do not go overboard either! Beyond a certain point, too many reminder sets will fatigue the muscle, not help it. Two to four sets of static stretches, held for 15 to 20 seconds, can be a good foundation to work with.
How Can You Integrate Recovery Reminders?
The arsenal of recovery can be implemented 24 to 48 hours after you have worked the muscle involved. Reminder sets can be included at the beginning of your regular training (as a warm-up) or at the end (as a cool-down). Stretches can be done both before and after a workout.
Get a Head Start On Recovery
Another strategy enables you to work a muscle again even if the muscle has not yet fully recovered. This partial-recovery approach allows you to increase the frequency of your workouts for a muscle while avoiding overtraining. It is primarily intended for experienced lifters who are suffering from recovery issues. This tactic involves using a single exercise for the muscle in each workout and alternating exercises every workout.
Read more from The Strength Training Anatomy Workout, Volume II by Frederic Delavier and Michael Gundill.
How Can You Strengthen a Weak Area?
Everyone has some muscles that do not develop as easily as other muscles.
How Can You Strengthen a Weak Area?
Everyone has some muscles that do not develop as easily as other muscles. When faced with a weak area that is resisting growth, many athletes get discouraged and say that they have tried everything without success. But do you think that they have actually tried everything? To avoid this negative attitude, remember that there is always something you can do to build up a weak area. You can always find new combinations and new techniques to try.
Classic Strategies for Building Up Weak Areas
As mentioned, we all have muscles that respond well to training—and other muscles that do not. To balance out your physique, you need to attack weak areas head on. Here are the classic strategies for building up a weak area:
- Working the delayed muscle first at the beginning of a workout (when you have the most energy and are most focused)
- Doing more sets
- Trying to increase the weight
More Radical Methods
Often, these classic techniques prove inadequate because they do not attack the problem at its root. They can help if the development gap is small, but they do not allow you to build up a muscle that is truly delayed. If you are faced with hypertrophy disparities that affect your muscles, it is better to adopt more radical measures. Above all, building up a weak area requires a good understanding of its causes.
True and False Work Areas
You may experience two kinds of weak areas: true and false.
- A false weak area is a muscle group that is less developed than other muscles because of ineffective training. The lack of volume in a muscle group can be explained by a lack of training or by workouts done in a rush or irregularly. This is often the case for the calves or the thighs. In general, correcting this kind of underdevelopment is relatively easy if you train the muscle regularly and intensely.
- A true weak area is a muscle that does not get bigger despite serious work. We will be focusing on this kind of weak area.
What Causes a True Weak Area?
In theory, muscles should all develop at the same speed, because the hormones and nutrients responsible for anabolism are found in equal concentrations in every muscle. But in reality, muscle growth is influenced more by localized physiological changes than by overall anabolism.
Root of the Problem
True weak areas are caused by three main factors:
- Genetics
- Athletic history
- Difficulties with muscle recruitment
GENETICS
Genetics influences the structure of your strong and weak areas in five ways:
UPPER BODY VERSUS LOWER BODY
Because of genetic factors, we can divide the body into two parts. Some people have an easier time developing the upper-body muscles, while others find it easier to develop the lower-body muscles. People rarely have perfect harmony between the upper and lower body. Even people who seem to have a balanced physique will always have an easier time with either the upper- or lower-body muscles. This is a strong tendency that few people can escape.
GENETIC ASYMMETRY
We are not symmetrical. Some muscles are always more developed on one side of the body than on the other side.
Do not worry if you discover that one of your arms is bigger than the other. The difference is sometimes a fraction of an inch, and sometimes half an inch. Our skeletons are not perfectly symmetrical either. For example, one collarbone might be bigger than the other. This lack of symmetry changes the lever in all upper-body exercises, particularly exercises for the shoulders, chest, and back. Naturally, this will affect strength and will therefore affect muscle development. Skeletal asymmetry may also be at the root of injuries, especially when performing exercises with a long bar.
Short Muscles, Long Muscles
The length of a muscle is one of the primary factors determining how much it can develop. The longer a muscle is (that is, the farther it runs from its insertion points), the easier it is to build the muscle.
On the contrary, the shorter a muscle is, the more difficult it is to develop. For example, muscle length can vary with the calves, which are perched high up on the tibia, or the biceps, which end far away from the forearm. Unfortunately, because muscle length is determined genetically, you cannot lengthen a muscle.
Fibrous Density and Development
The more fibers a muscle has, the bigger it is, even without strength training. During exercise, a dense muscle will react better than the same muscle with fewer fibers. Fortunately, the number of muscle fibers can be increased using these methods:
> Traumatic training strategies such as accentuated negatives.
> Nutritional supplements such as
whey protein, leucine, and creatine. When used just after each workout, these supplements can stimulate the manufacture of new satellite cells. As you continue exercising, these new cells transform into muscle fibers.
Difficulty With Muscle Pump
A direct relationship exists between a muscle's capacity to get pumped during exercise and how fast the muscle grows. The more a muscle swells during a set, the more quickly the muscle will grow. Muscles that have difficulty filling with blood when you work them will always lag behind in development. You can improve this factor by using long sets.
Athletic History
You have the power to influence your genetics. If you played sports when you were younger, the muscles that you used most often in those sports will be the easiest to develop through strength training.
For example, if you did a lot of push-ups when you were young, you will be able to build your chest and triceps faster than average when you start strength train-ing. Having an athletic history helps you become successful in strength training.
If you never played a sport, or if your sport did not precondition all of your muscles, you can use sets of 100 reps to compensate for the absence of this fundamental work.
Difficulty With Muscle Recruitment
Weak areas are generally muscles that you have difficulty feeling and, therefore, recruiting during exercise. This difficulty can be explained by three phenomena:
Blindly Following Dogma
Beware of the many deeply rooted beliefs about muscle recruitment in strength training. For example, one such belief is that the bench press is only a chest exercise. Another belief is that the more weight you push during the press, the larger your chest muscles will become. For lifters who have good chest muscles, these two hypotheses prove correct. But these same beliefs are also the cause of many weak chests.
How many people who strength train spend time learning how to recruit their chest muscles as much as possible during the bench press? Generally, lift-ers just try to use heavier and heav-ier weights in the hope that they will finally be able to build the chest they want. Unfortunately, this tactic does not always work, and it becomes a waste of time. This is true not only for the bench press but also for other compound exercises such as the squat (for building the quadriceps) and rowing or pulling (for building your back). Just because an exercise is supposed to work the upper pectoralis muscle or the brachialis does not mean that the muscle you are targeting will be automatically recruited.
Intermuscular Competition
A recruitment competition takes place among muscles. In a compound exercise such as the bench press—which recruits the arms, the shoulders, and the chest—the most developed muscles are always recruited first. For example, a person who has strong arms or strong shoulders will overrecruit them during the press portion of the exercise, to the detriment of the chest muscles.
Common Competitions Between Muscles
>Powerful arms could prevent the growth of the chest, the shoulders, and the back.
>Big forearms can interrupt the development of the biceps.
>A strong chest could make it difficult to build up the shoulders.
>Good shoulders are an obstacle to building the chest muscles.
>If the back of the shoulder is very thick, it could interfere with back work.
>Prominent buttocks can restrict the recruitment of the quadriceps and the hamstrings.
Imperfections in Muscle Recruitment
Each repetition, each set, and each workout leave their mark not only on the muscles, but also on the central nervous system.
Taken together, these traces constitute your motor behavior. If the bench press works your shoulders and your chest too much every time you do it, this flawed recruitment becomes more deeply ingrained. This will aggravate the problem instead of resolving it.
Read more from The Strength Training Anatomy Workout, Volume II by Frederic Delavier and Michael Gundill.
How to Dominate Your Muscles by Segmenting Them
You need to know whether each one of your muscles is polyarticular or monoarticular. To understand the difference, consider the example of the brachialis and the biceps.
Segmenting Muscles So You Can Dominate Them
You need to know whether each one of your muscles is polyarticular or monoarticular. To understand the difference, consider the example of the brachialis and the biceps:
>The brachialis is monoarticular, because it attaches to the forearm and the humerus (arm bone): It only covers a single joint.
>The biceps is polyarticular, because it attaches to the shoulder and the forearm (not to the humerus): It covers two joints.
To separate the various functions of polyarticular muscles, we can focus on the length-tension relationship. We will have to divide monoarticular groups in a more artificial manner.
The Length-Tension Relationship
The tension (strength) of a muscle is not uniform. When a muscle is stretched to the extreme, it has very little strength. The same thing happens when a muscle is shortened to its maximum. We can conclude that somewhere between these two extremes is the point where a muscle has the best chance to express its strength. So each muscle has an optimal length at which it can mobilize its maximum power. The farther you stretch the muscle from its optimal length (either by stretching or by contracting), the less effective it will be. This means that you will not be able to recruit it and contract it with power.
The concept of the length-tension relationship might seem abstract, but you must understand it when you are working polyarticular muscles such as the biceps, triceps, hamstrings, and calves.
Segmenting the Biceps
The biceps is made up of two heads (parts). With the strategy of segmentation, the idea is to separate the workouts for these two heads so that you work one head while the other head is recovering, and vice versa. This way, you can work the biceps more often, despite an incomplete recovery.
In practice, when you push your elbow toward the back, the following occurs:
>The long head of the biceps (outer part) is placed in a favorable length-tension position.
> The short head of the biceps (inner part) is placed in an unfavorable length-tension position.
result:The long head takes control, leav-ing the short head less able to contract. The benchmark exercise here is an incline curl done on a bench (as flat as possible) using a dumbbell.
However, when the elbow is in front of the body, the following occurs:
>The short head of the biceps works first.
>The long head has more difficulty getting involved.
This is the case with most biceps machines and Scott curl benches. So, by changing the stretch in your biceps, you change each head's ability to participate in the movement. When you work out, you can do either of these:
>Work the biceps from both angles.
>Work the biceps from only one angle.
If you are focusing on only one angle, the first workout can target the short head, and the second workout can focus on the long head. For the third workout, begin the cycle again.
Segmenting the Triceps
The long head of the triceps (inner part) is polyarticular. The other two heads are monoarticular. To increase the recruitment of the long head, you need to stretch it, which puts it in a favorable length-
tension position. To do this, you must choose triceps exercises where your arms are placed close to your head. During the next workout, you can accentuate the work of the other two heads by putting your arms alongside your body with your elbows as far back as possible.
Segmenting the Shoulders
Even though the deltoid is monoarticular, this muscle can be divided into three parts:
>The front (anterior)
>The side (lateral or middle)
>The back (posterior)
The first workout, based on presses, will target the front part of the shoulder. The second workout will focus on the back part, and the third will work the side. Then you will begin the cycle again.
Segmenting the Back
In strength training, most people think there are two main categories of back exercises:
>Those that work on size (primarily the latissimus dorsi)
>Those that work on thickness (trape-ius and rhomboids)
This distinction, even though it is very artificial, will work for our purposes. Instead of combining pull-ups and rows in every workout, you can devote the first workout to pull-ups (for size) and leave the rows (targeting thickness) for the next workout.
Segmenting the Chest
The chest can be divided into two sections:
>The upper section
>The lower section
People often try to stimulate both sections every time they work out. However, you should try to concentrate on only one part in each workout. For this segmentation technique to work effectively, you must have already learned how to isolate the upper part of your chest. The easiest way to learn this is to perform light cable work that targets the section of the pectoralis major nearest to the clavicle.
Segmenting the Abdominal Muscles
Segmenting the abdominal muscles is easy. You need to work these sections:
>The upper section
>The lower section
Therefore, alternating between specific exercises for each region is very simple.
Segmenting the Calves
The gastrocnemius muscles are polyarticular, but the soleus is monoarticular. If you work from a seated position, you make your gastrocnemius muscles soft, and they can no longer contract.
However, the straighter your legs are, the more the gastrocnemius muscles will be stimulated. Ideally, you should lean forward (as in donkey calf raises or leg presses) to find the ideal length-tension position for the gastrocnemius muscles. You can do one workout with straight legs and another workout while seated with bent legs.
Segmenting the Hamstrings
The hamstrings have two functions:
>To flex the leg (e.g., in leg curls)
>To straighten the torso (e.g., in a deadlift)
Focus on the first function during one workout, and then focus on the second function during the next workout.
Segmenting the Quadriceps
Our strategy of dividing muscles into parts does not work here because it is difficult to divide up quadriceps exercises. Instead, you can use a strategy of alternating between using machines and using a bar. This will allow you to rotate through three main exercises:
>Squats
>Leg presses
>Hack squats
Instead of using two or three exercises per workout, you should concentrate on only one exercise.
Read more from The Strength Training Anatomy Workout, Volume II by Frederic Delavier and Michael Gundill.
How to Accelerate Recovery
Our ability to tire out our muscles, joints, nervous system, and endocrine system is limitless.
Strategies to Accelerate Recovery
Our ability to tire out our muscles, joints, nervous system, and endocrine system is limitless. We just have to keep working out more. However, our ability to recover is extremely limited. Faced with this dilemma—and keeping in mind that recovery is eternal—we can choose to passively let nature take its course, or we can take control of the situation.
If you want to take charge, you can use these two strategies:
>Accelerate the regenerative process by using reminders.
>Get a head start on recovery.
Why Does Recovery Take So Long?
The length of recovery is the result of the rapid decrease in anabolism after a workout. Scientific studies show the following: In the 8 hours after a workout, recovery is very efficient; however, after that point, recovery slows down, and the speed of regeneration decreases exponentially. For example, if 48 hours are required for recovery after a given workout,
>85 percent of your physical capacity is recovered in 24 hours, and
>the other 15 percent requires an additional 24 hours.
If the speed of recovery during those first few hours were maintained, only 4 additional hours would be needed for a complete recovery. Unfortunately, we have to struggle with the inefficiency of the regenerative process; this process slows down too early, before completing its masterpiece.
The Concept of Reminders
We must find ways to maintain the recov-ery mechanisms until the body has completely recovered. The first way is to exploit the benefits of nontraumatic “reminders.”
Reminder Sets
Reminder sets involve performing just a few sets of an exercise to lightly work a recovering muscle. These sets should be long and light. Reminder sets are the best way to reenergize the anabolism process when it is slowing down. Instead of waiting for the complete recovery of a muscle group, you will gently retrain that muscle group during the recovery phase. If this work is truly not traumatic, there will be no negative effects. However, if you traumatize the muscle again, your recovery will be even further delayed. Sayers et al. (2000. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise 32(9):1587-92) showed that in the days after a very traumatic biceps workout, doing a light set of 50 repetitions daily accelerated recovery speed by 24 percent. Here are a few simple rules to follow when you want to rework a muscle without traumatizing it:
- Choose an isolation exercise rather than a compound exercise. This enables you to better focus your efforts.
- Opt for machines or cables so that you can avoid free weights. Free weights do not isolate muscles as well and can cause more trauma.
- Use a light weight and do a high number of repetitions. Your goal is to bring as much blood as possible to the muscle.
- Be very careful to use proper form while performing the exercise.
- Do no more than three sets with low intensity.
Reminder Stretching
Stretching can also strengthen waning anabolism. The advantage of stretching is that it is less tiring than a reminder set; the disadvantage is that it is also less productive. Ideally, you could combine stretching and reminder sets for maximum effectiveness. But do not go overboard either! Beyond a certain point, too many reminder sets will fatigue the muscle, not help it. Two to four sets of static stretches, held for 15 to 20 seconds, can be a good foundation to work with.
How Can You Integrate Recovery Reminders?
The arsenal of recovery can be implemented 24 to 48 hours after you have worked the muscle involved. Reminder sets can be included at the beginning of your regular training (as a warm-up) or at the end (as a cool-down). Stretches can be done both before and after a workout.
Get a Head Start On Recovery
Another strategy enables you to work a muscle again even if the muscle has not yet fully recovered. This partial-recovery approach allows you to increase the frequency of your workouts for a muscle while avoiding overtraining. It is primarily intended for experienced lifters who are suffering from recovery issues. This tactic involves using a single exercise for the muscle in each workout and alternating exercises every workout.
Read more from The Strength Training Anatomy Workout, Volume II by Frederic Delavier and Michael Gundill.
How Can You Strengthen a Weak Area?
Everyone has some muscles that do not develop as easily as other muscles.
How Can You Strengthen a Weak Area?
Everyone has some muscles that do not develop as easily as other muscles. When faced with a weak area that is resisting growth, many athletes get discouraged and say that they have tried everything without success. But do you think that they have actually tried everything? To avoid this negative attitude, remember that there is always something you can do to build up a weak area. You can always find new combinations and new techniques to try.
Classic Strategies for Building Up Weak Areas
As mentioned, we all have muscles that respond well to training—and other muscles that do not. To balance out your physique, you need to attack weak areas head on. Here are the classic strategies for building up a weak area:
- Working the delayed muscle first at the beginning of a workout (when you have the most energy and are most focused)
- Doing more sets
- Trying to increase the weight
More Radical Methods
Often, these classic techniques prove inadequate because they do not attack the problem at its root. They can help if the development gap is small, but they do not allow you to build up a muscle that is truly delayed. If you are faced with hypertrophy disparities that affect your muscles, it is better to adopt more radical measures. Above all, building up a weak area requires a good understanding of its causes.
True and False Work Areas
You may experience two kinds of weak areas: true and false.
- A false weak area is a muscle group that is less developed than other muscles because of ineffective training. The lack of volume in a muscle group can be explained by a lack of training or by workouts done in a rush or irregularly. This is often the case for the calves or the thighs. In general, correcting this kind of underdevelopment is relatively easy if you train the muscle regularly and intensely.
- A true weak area is a muscle that does not get bigger despite serious work. We will be focusing on this kind of weak area.
What Causes a True Weak Area?
In theory, muscles should all develop at the same speed, because the hormones and nutrients responsible for anabolism are found in equal concentrations in every muscle. But in reality, muscle growth is influenced more by localized physiological changes than by overall anabolism.
Root of the Problem
True weak areas are caused by three main factors:
- Genetics
- Athletic history
- Difficulties with muscle recruitment
GENETICS
Genetics influences the structure of your strong and weak areas in five ways:
UPPER BODY VERSUS LOWER BODY
Because of genetic factors, we can divide the body into two parts. Some people have an easier time developing the upper-body muscles, while others find it easier to develop the lower-body muscles. People rarely have perfect harmony between the upper and lower body. Even people who seem to have a balanced physique will always have an easier time with either the upper- or lower-body muscles. This is a strong tendency that few people can escape.
GENETIC ASYMMETRY
We are not symmetrical. Some muscles are always more developed on one side of the body than on the other side.
Do not worry if you discover that one of your arms is bigger than the other. The difference is sometimes a fraction of an inch, and sometimes half an inch. Our skeletons are not perfectly symmetrical either. For example, one collarbone might be bigger than the other. This lack of symmetry changes the lever in all upper-body exercises, particularly exercises for the shoulders, chest, and back. Naturally, this will affect strength and will therefore affect muscle development. Skeletal asymmetry may also be at the root of injuries, especially when performing exercises with a long bar.
Short Muscles, Long Muscles
The length of a muscle is one of the primary factors determining how much it can develop. The longer a muscle is (that is, the farther it runs from its insertion points), the easier it is to build the muscle.
On the contrary, the shorter a muscle is, the more difficult it is to develop. For example, muscle length can vary with the calves, which are perched high up on the tibia, or the biceps, which end far away from the forearm. Unfortunately, because muscle length is determined genetically, you cannot lengthen a muscle.
Fibrous Density and Development
The more fibers a muscle has, the bigger it is, even without strength training. During exercise, a dense muscle will react better than the same muscle with fewer fibers. Fortunately, the number of muscle fibers can be increased using these methods:
> Traumatic training strategies such as accentuated negatives.
> Nutritional supplements such as
whey protein, leucine, and creatine. When used just after each workout, these supplements can stimulate the manufacture of new satellite cells. As you continue exercising, these new cells transform into muscle fibers.
Difficulty With Muscle Pump
A direct relationship exists between a muscle's capacity to get pumped during exercise and how fast the muscle grows. The more a muscle swells during a set, the more quickly the muscle will grow. Muscles that have difficulty filling with blood when you work them will always lag behind in development. You can improve this factor by using long sets.
Athletic History
You have the power to influence your genetics. If you played sports when you were younger, the muscles that you used most often in those sports will be the easiest to develop through strength training.
For example, if you did a lot of push-ups when you were young, you will be able to build your chest and triceps faster than average when you start strength train-ing. Having an athletic history helps you become successful in strength training.
If you never played a sport, or if your sport did not precondition all of your muscles, you can use sets of 100 reps to compensate for the absence of this fundamental work.
Difficulty With Muscle Recruitment
Weak areas are generally muscles that you have difficulty feeling and, therefore, recruiting during exercise. This difficulty can be explained by three phenomena:
Blindly Following Dogma
Beware of the many deeply rooted beliefs about muscle recruitment in strength training. For example, one such belief is that the bench press is only a chest exercise. Another belief is that the more weight you push during the press, the larger your chest muscles will become. For lifters who have good chest muscles, these two hypotheses prove correct. But these same beliefs are also the cause of many weak chests.
How many people who strength train spend time learning how to recruit their chest muscles as much as possible during the bench press? Generally, lift-ers just try to use heavier and heav-ier weights in the hope that they will finally be able to build the chest they want. Unfortunately, this tactic does not always work, and it becomes a waste of time. This is true not only for the bench press but also for other compound exercises such as the squat (for building the quadriceps) and rowing or pulling (for building your back). Just because an exercise is supposed to work the upper pectoralis muscle or the brachialis does not mean that the muscle you are targeting will be automatically recruited.
Intermuscular Competition
A recruitment competition takes place among muscles. In a compound exercise such as the bench press—which recruits the arms, the shoulders, and the chest—the most developed muscles are always recruited first. For example, a person who has strong arms or strong shoulders will overrecruit them during the press portion of the exercise, to the detriment of the chest muscles.
Common Competitions Between Muscles
>Powerful arms could prevent the growth of the chest, the shoulders, and the back.
>Big forearms can interrupt the development of the biceps.
>A strong chest could make it difficult to build up the shoulders.
>Good shoulders are an obstacle to building the chest muscles.
>If the back of the shoulder is very thick, it could interfere with back work.
>Prominent buttocks can restrict the recruitment of the quadriceps and the hamstrings.
Imperfections in Muscle Recruitment
Each repetition, each set, and each workout leave their mark not only on the muscles, but also on the central nervous system.
Taken together, these traces constitute your motor behavior. If the bench press works your shoulders and your chest too much every time you do it, this flawed recruitment becomes more deeply ingrained. This will aggravate the problem instead of resolving it.
Read more from The Strength Training Anatomy Workout, Volume II by Frederic Delavier and Michael Gundill.
How to Dominate Your Muscles by Segmenting Them
You need to know whether each one of your muscles is polyarticular or monoarticular. To understand the difference, consider the example of the brachialis and the biceps.
Segmenting Muscles So You Can Dominate Them
You need to know whether each one of your muscles is polyarticular or monoarticular. To understand the difference, consider the example of the brachialis and the biceps:
>The brachialis is monoarticular, because it attaches to the forearm and the humerus (arm bone): It only covers a single joint.
>The biceps is polyarticular, because it attaches to the shoulder and the forearm (not to the humerus): It covers two joints.
To separate the various functions of polyarticular muscles, we can focus on the length-tension relationship. We will have to divide monoarticular groups in a more artificial manner.
The Length-Tension Relationship
The tension (strength) of a muscle is not uniform. When a muscle is stretched to the extreme, it has very little strength. The same thing happens when a muscle is shortened to its maximum. We can conclude that somewhere between these two extremes is the point where a muscle has the best chance to express its strength. So each muscle has an optimal length at which it can mobilize its maximum power. The farther you stretch the muscle from its optimal length (either by stretching or by contracting), the less effective it will be. This means that you will not be able to recruit it and contract it with power.
The concept of the length-tension relationship might seem abstract, but you must understand it when you are working polyarticular muscles such as the biceps, triceps, hamstrings, and calves.
Segmenting the Biceps
The biceps is made up of two heads (parts). With the strategy of segmentation, the idea is to separate the workouts for these two heads so that you work one head while the other head is recovering, and vice versa. This way, you can work the biceps more often, despite an incomplete recovery.
In practice, when you push your elbow toward the back, the following occurs:
>The long head of the biceps (outer part) is placed in a favorable length-tension position.
> The short head of the biceps (inner part) is placed in an unfavorable length-tension position.
result:The long head takes control, leav-ing the short head less able to contract. The benchmark exercise here is an incline curl done on a bench (as flat as possible) using a dumbbell.
However, when the elbow is in front of the body, the following occurs:
>The short head of the biceps works first.
>The long head has more difficulty getting involved.
This is the case with most biceps machines and Scott curl benches. So, by changing the stretch in your biceps, you change each head's ability to participate in the movement. When you work out, you can do either of these:
>Work the biceps from both angles.
>Work the biceps from only one angle.
If you are focusing on only one angle, the first workout can target the short head, and the second workout can focus on the long head. For the third workout, begin the cycle again.
Segmenting the Triceps
The long head of the triceps (inner part) is polyarticular. The other two heads are monoarticular. To increase the recruitment of the long head, you need to stretch it, which puts it in a favorable length-
tension position. To do this, you must choose triceps exercises where your arms are placed close to your head. During the next workout, you can accentuate the work of the other two heads by putting your arms alongside your body with your elbows as far back as possible.
Segmenting the Shoulders
Even though the deltoid is monoarticular, this muscle can be divided into three parts:
>The front (anterior)
>The side (lateral or middle)
>The back (posterior)
The first workout, based on presses, will target the front part of the shoulder. The second workout will focus on the back part, and the third will work the side. Then you will begin the cycle again.
Segmenting the Back
In strength training, most people think there are two main categories of back exercises:
>Those that work on size (primarily the latissimus dorsi)
>Those that work on thickness (trape-ius and rhomboids)
This distinction, even though it is very artificial, will work for our purposes. Instead of combining pull-ups and rows in every workout, you can devote the first workout to pull-ups (for size) and leave the rows (targeting thickness) for the next workout.
Segmenting the Chest
The chest can be divided into two sections:
>The upper section
>The lower section
People often try to stimulate both sections every time they work out. However, you should try to concentrate on only one part in each workout. For this segmentation technique to work effectively, you must have already learned how to isolate the upper part of your chest. The easiest way to learn this is to perform light cable work that targets the section of the pectoralis major nearest to the clavicle.
Segmenting the Abdominal Muscles
Segmenting the abdominal muscles is easy. You need to work these sections:
>The upper section
>The lower section
Therefore, alternating between specific exercises for each region is very simple.
Segmenting the Calves
The gastrocnemius muscles are polyarticular, but the soleus is monoarticular. If you work from a seated position, you make your gastrocnemius muscles soft, and they can no longer contract.
However, the straighter your legs are, the more the gastrocnemius muscles will be stimulated. Ideally, you should lean forward (as in donkey calf raises or leg presses) to find the ideal length-tension position for the gastrocnemius muscles. You can do one workout with straight legs and another workout while seated with bent legs.
Segmenting the Hamstrings
The hamstrings have two functions:
>To flex the leg (e.g., in leg curls)
>To straighten the torso (e.g., in a deadlift)
Focus on the first function during one workout, and then focus on the second function during the next workout.
Segmenting the Quadriceps
Our strategy of dividing muscles into parts does not work here because it is difficult to divide up quadriceps exercises. Instead, you can use a strategy of alternating between using machines and using a bar. This will allow you to rotate through three main exercises:
>Squats
>Leg presses
>Hack squats
Instead of using two or three exercises per workout, you should concentrate on only one exercise.
Read more from The Strength Training Anatomy Workout, Volume II by Frederic Delavier and Michael Gundill.
How to Accelerate Recovery
Our ability to tire out our muscles, joints, nervous system, and endocrine system is limitless.
Strategies to Accelerate Recovery
Our ability to tire out our muscles, joints, nervous system, and endocrine system is limitless. We just have to keep working out more. However, our ability to recover is extremely limited. Faced with this dilemma—and keeping in mind that recovery is eternal—we can choose to passively let nature take its course, or we can take control of the situation.
If you want to take charge, you can use these two strategies:
>Accelerate the regenerative process by using reminders.
>Get a head start on recovery.
Why Does Recovery Take So Long?
The length of recovery is the result of the rapid decrease in anabolism after a workout. Scientific studies show the following: In the 8 hours after a workout, recovery is very efficient; however, after that point, recovery slows down, and the speed of regeneration decreases exponentially. For example, if 48 hours are required for recovery after a given workout,
>85 percent of your physical capacity is recovered in 24 hours, and
>the other 15 percent requires an additional 24 hours.
If the speed of recovery during those first few hours were maintained, only 4 additional hours would be needed for a complete recovery. Unfortunately, we have to struggle with the inefficiency of the regenerative process; this process slows down too early, before completing its masterpiece.
The Concept of Reminders
We must find ways to maintain the recov-ery mechanisms until the body has completely recovered. The first way is to exploit the benefits of nontraumatic “reminders.”
Reminder Sets
Reminder sets involve performing just a few sets of an exercise to lightly work a recovering muscle. These sets should be long and light. Reminder sets are the best way to reenergize the anabolism process when it is slowing down. Instead of waiting for the complete recovery of a muscle group, you will gently retrain that muscle group during the recovery phase. If this work is truly not traumatic, there will be no negative effects. However, if you traumatize the muscle again, your recovery will be even further delayed. Sayers et al. (2000. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise 32(9):1587-92) showed that in the days after a very traumatic biceps workout, doing a light set of 50 repetitions daily accelerated recovery speed by 24 percent. Here are a few simple rules to follow when you want to rework a muscle without traumatizing it:
- Choose an isolation exercise rather than a compound exercise. This enables you to better focus your efforts.
- Opt for machines or cables so that you can avoid free weights. Free weights do not isolate muscles as well and can cause more trauma.
- Use a light weight and do a high number of repetitions. Your goal is to bring as much blood as possible to the muscle.
- Be very careful to use proper form while performing the exercise.
- Do no more than three sets with low intensity.
Reminder Stretching
Stretching can also strengthen waning anabolism. The advantage of stretching is that it is less tiring than a reminder set; the disadvantage is that it is also less productive. Ideally, you could combine stretching and reminder sets for maximum effectiveness. But do not go overboard either! Beyond a certain point, too many reminder sets will fatigue the muscle, not help it. Two to four sets of static stretches, held for 15 to 20 seconds, can be a good foundation to work with.
How Can You Integrate Recovery Reminders?
The arsenal of recovery can be implemented 24 to 48 hours after you have worked the muscle involved. Reminder sets can be included at the beginning of your regular training (as a warm-up) or at the end (as a cool-down). Stretches can be done both before and after a workout.
Get a Head Start On Recovery
Another strategy enables you to work a muscle again even if the muscle has not yet fully recovered. This partial-recovery approach allows you to increase the frequency of your workouts for a muscle while avoiding overtraining. It is primarily intended for experienced lifters who are suffering from recovery issues. This tactic involves using a single exercise for the muscle in each workout and alternating exercises every workout.
Read more from The Strength Training Anatomy Workout, Volume II by Frederic Delavier and Michael Gundill.
How Can You Strengthen a Weak Area?
Everyone has some muscles that do not develop as easily as other muscles.
How Can You Strengthen a Weak Area?
Everyone has some muscles that do not develop as easily as other muscles. When faced with a weak area that is resisting growth, many athletes get discouraged and say that they have tried everything without success. But do you think that they have actually tried everything? To avoid this negative attitude, remember that there is always something you can do to build up a weak area. You can always find new combinations and new techniques to try.
Classic Strategies for Building Up Weak Areas
As mentioned, we all have muscles that respond well to training—and other muscles that do not. To balance out your physique, you need to attack weak areas head on. Here are the classic strategies for building up a weak area:
- Working the delayed muscle first at the beginning of a workout (when you have the most energy and are most focused)
- Doing more sets
- Trying to increase the weight
More Radical Methods
Often, these classic techniques prove inadequate because they do not attack the problem at its root. They can help if the development gap is small, but they do not allow you to build up a muscle that is truly delayed. If you are faced with hypertrophy disparities that affect your muscles, it is better to adopt more radical measures. Above all, building up a weak area requires a good understanding of its causes.
True and False Work Areas
You may experience two kinds of weak areas: true and false.
- A false weak area is a muscle group that is less developed than other muscles because of ineffective training. The lack of volume in a muscle group can be explained by a lack of training or by workouts done in a rush or irregularly. This is often the case for the calves or the thighs. In general, correcting this kind of underdevelopment is relatively easy if you train the muscle regularly and intensely.
- A true weak area is a muscle that does not get bigger despite serious work. We will be focusing on this kind of weak area.
What Causes a True Weak Area?
In theory, muscles should all develop at the same speed, because the hormones and nutrients responsible for anabolism are found in equal concentrations in every muscle. But in reality, muscle growth is influenced more by localized physiological changes than by overall anabolism.
Root of the Problem
True weak areas are caused by three main factors:
- Genetics
- Athletic history
- Difficulties with muscle recruitment
GENETICS
Genetics influences the structure of your strong and weak areas in five ways:
UPPER BODY VERSUS LOWER BODY
Because of genetic factors, we can divide the body into two parts. Some people have an easier time developing the upper-body muscles, while others find it easier to develop the lower-body muscles. People rarely have perfect harmony between the upper and lower body. Even people who seem to have a balanced physique will always have an easier time with either the upper- or lower-body muscles. This is a strong tendency that few people can escape.
GENETIC ASYMMETRY
We are not symmetrical. Some muscles are always more developed on one side of the body than on the other side.
Do not worry if you discover that one of your arms is bigger than the other. The difference is sometimes a fraction of an inch, and sometimes half an inch. Our skeletons are not perfectly symmetrical either. For example, one collarbone might be bigger than the other. This lack of symmetry changes the lever in all upper-body exercises, particularly exercises for the shoulders, chest, and back. Naturally, this will affect strength and will therefore affect muscle development. Skeletal asymmetry may also be at the root of injuries, especially when performing exercises with a long bar.
Short Muscles, Long Muscles
The length of a muscle is one of the primary factors determining how much it can develop. The longer a muscle is (that is, the farther it runs from its insertion points), the easier it is to build the muscle.
On the contrary, the shorter a muscle is, the more difficult it is to develop. For example, muscle length can vary with the calves, which are perched high up on the tibia, or the biceps, which end far away from the forearm. Unfortunately, because muscle length is determined genetically, you cannot lengthen a muscle.
Fibrous Density and Development
The more fibers a muscle has, the bigger it is, even without strength training. During exercise, a dense muscle will react better than the same muscle with fewer fibers. Fortunately, the number of muscle fibers can be increased using these methods:
> Traumatic training strategies such as accentuated negatives.
> Nutritional supplements such as
whey protein, leucine, and creatine. When used just after each workout, these supplements can stimulate the manufacture of new satellite cells. As you continue exercising, these new cells transform into muscle fibers.
Difficulty With Muscle Pump
A direct relationship exists between a muscle's capacity to get pumped during exercise and how fast the muscle grows. The more a muscle swells during a set, the more quickly the muscle will grow. Muscles that have difficulty filling with blood when you work them will always lag behind in development. You can improve this factor by using long sets.
Athletic History
You have the power to influence your genetics. If you played sports when you were younger, the muscles that you used most often in those sports will be the easiest to develop through strength training.
For example, if you did a lot of push-ups when you were young, you will be able to build your chest and triceps faster than average when you start strength train-ing. Having an athletic history helps you become successful in strength training.
If you never played a sport, or if your sport did not precondition all of your muscles, you can use sets of 100 reps to compensate for the absence of this fundamental work.
Difficulty With Muscle Recruitment
Weak areas are generally muscles that you have difficulty feeling and, therefore, recruiting during exercise. This difficulty can be explained by three phenomena:
Blindly Following Dogma
Beware of the many deeply rooted beliefs about muscle recruitment in strength training. For example, one such belief is that the bench press is only a chest exercise. Another belief is that the more weight you push during the press, the larger your chest muscles will become. For lifters who have good chest muscles, these two hypotheses prove correct. But these same beliefs are also the cause of many weak chests.
How many people who strength train spend time learning how to recruit their chest muscles as much as possible during the bench press? Generally, lift-ers just try to use heavier and heav-ier weights in the hope that they will finally be able to build the chest they want. Unfortunately, this tactic does not always work, and it becomes a waste of time. This is true not only for the bench press but also for other compound exercises such as the squat (for building the quadriceps) and rowing or pulling (for building your back). Just because an exercise is supposed to work the upper pectoralis muscle or the brachialis does not mean that the muscle you are targeting will be automatically recruited.
Intermuscular Competition
A recruitment competition takes place among muscles. In a compound exercise such as the bench press—which recruits the arms, the shoulders, and the chest—the most developed muscles are always recruited first. For example, a person who has strong arms or strong shoulders will overrecruit them during the press portion of the exercise, to the detriment of the chest muscles.
Common Competitions Between Muscles
>Powerful arms could prevent the growth of the chest, the shoulders, and the back.
>Big forearms can interrupt the development of the biceps.
>A strong chest could make it difficult to build up the shoulders.
>Good shoulders are an obstacle to building the chest muscles.
>If the back of the shoulder is very thick, it could interfere with back work.
>Prominent buttocks can restrict the recruitment of the quadriceps and the hamstrings.
Imperfections in Muscle Recruitment
Each repetition, each set, and each workout leave their mark not only on the muscles, but also on the central nervous system.
Taken together, these traces constitute your motor behavior. If the bench press works your shoulders and your chest too much every time you do it, this flawed recruitment becomes more deeply ingrained. This will aggravate the problem instead of resolving it.
Read more from The Strength Training Anatomy Workout, Volume II by Frederic Delavier and Michael Gundill.
How to Dominate Your Muscles by Segmenting Them
You need to know whether each one of your muscles is polyarticular or monoarticular. To understand the difference, consider the example of the brachialis and the biceps.
Segmenting Muscles So You Can Dominate Them
You need to know whether each one of your muscles is polyarticular or monoarticular. To understand the difference, consider the example of the brachialis and the biceps:
>The brachialis is monoarticular, because it attaches to the forearm and the humerus (arm bone): It only covers a single joint.
>The biceps is polyarticular, because it attaches to the shoulder and the forearm (not to the humerus): It covers two joints.
To separate the various functions of polyarticular muscles, we can focus on the length-tension relationship. We will have to divide monoarticular groups in a more artificial manner.
The Length-Tension Relationship
The tension (strength) of a muscle is not uniform. When a muscle is stretched to the extreme, it has very little strength. The same thing happens when a muscle is shortened to its maximum. We can conclude that somewhere between these two extremes is the point where a muscle has the best chance to express its strength. So each muscle has an optimal length at which it can mobilize its maximum power. The farther you stretch the muscle from its optimal length (either by stretching or by contracting), the less effective it will be. This means that you will not be able to recruit it and contract it with power.
The concept of the length-tension relationship might seem abstract, but you must understand it when you are working polyarticular muscles such as the biceps, triceps, hamstrings, and calves.
Segmenting the Biceps
The biceps is made up of two heads (parts). With the strategy of segmentation, the idea is to separate the workouts for these two heads so that you work one head while the other head is recovering, and vice versa. This way, you can work the biceps more often, despite an incomplete recovery.
In practice, when you push your elbow toward the back, the following occurs:
>The long head of the biceps (outer part) is placed in a favorable length-tension position.
> The short head of the biceps (inner part) is placed in an unfavorable length-tension position.
result:The long head takes control, leav-ing the short head less able to contract. The benchmark exercise here is an incline curl done on a bench (as flat as possible) using a dumbbell.
However, when the elbow is in front of the body, the following occurs:
>The short head of the biceps works first.
>The long head has more difficulty getting involved.
This is the case with most biceps machines and Scott curl benches. So, by changing the stretch in your biceps, you change each head's ability to participate in the movement. When you work out, you can do either of these:
>Work the biceps from both angles.
>Work the biceps from only one angle.
If you are focusing on only one angle, the first workout can target the short head, and the second workout can focus on the long head. For the third workout, begin the cycle again.
Segmenting the Triceps
The long head of the triceps (inner part) is polyarticular. The other two heads are monoarticular. To increase the recruitment of the long head, you need to stretch it, which puts it in a favorable length-
tension position. To do this, you must choose triceps exercises where your arms are placed close to your head. During the next workout, you can accentuate the work of the other two heads by putting your arms alongside your body with your elbows as far back as possible.
Segmenting the Shoulders
Even though the deltoid is monoarticular, this muscle can be divided into three parts:
>The front (anterior)
>The side (lateral or middle)
>The back (posterior)
The first workout, based on presses, will target the front part of the shoulder. The second workout will focus on the back part, and the third will work the side. Then you will begin the cycle again.
Segmenting the Back
In strength training, most people think there are two main categories of back exercises:
>Those that work on size (primarily the latissimus dorsi)
>Those that work on thickness (trape-ius and rhomboids)
This distinction, even though it is very artificial, will work for our purposes. Instead of combining pull-ups and rows in every workout, you can devote the first workout to pull-ups (for size) and leave the rows (targeting thickness) for the next workout.
Segmenting the Chest
The chest can be divided into two sections:
>The upper section
>The lower section
People often try to stimulate both sections every time they work out. However, you should try to concentrate on only one part in each workout. For this segmentation technique to work effectively, you must have already learned how to isolate the upper part of your chest. The easiest way to learn this is to perform light cable work that targets the section of the pectoralis major nearest to the clavicle.
Segmenting the Abdominal Muscles
Segmenting the abdominal muscles is easy. You need to work these sections:
>The upper section
>The lower section
Therefore, alternating between specific exercises for each region is very simple.
Segmenting the Calves
The gastrocnemius muscles are polyarticular, but the soleus is monoarticular. If you work from a seated position, you make your gastrocnemius muscles soft, and they can no longer contract.
However, the straighter your legs are, the more the gastrocnemius muscles will be stimulated. Ideally, you should lean forward (as in donkey calf raises or leg presses) to find the ideal length-tension position for the gastrocnemius muscles. You can do one workout with straight legs and another workout while seated with bent legs.
Segmenting the Hamstrings
The hamstrings have two functions:
>To flex the leg (e.g., in leg curls)
>To straighten the torso (e.g., in a deadlift)
Focus on the first function during one workout, and then focus on the second function during the next workout.
Segmenting the Quadriceps
Our strategy of dividing muscles into parts does not work here because it is difficult to divide up quadriceps exercises. Instead, you can use a strategy of alternating between using machines and using a bar. This will allow you to rotate through three main exercises:
>Squats
>Leg presses
>Hack squats
Instead of using two or three exercises per workout, you should concentrate on only one exercise.
Read more from The Strength Training Anatomy Workout, Volume II by Frederic Delavier and Michael Gundill.
How to Accelerate Recovery
Our ability to tire out our muscles, joints, nervous system, and endocrine system is limitless.
Strategies to Accelerate Recovery
Our ability to tire out our muscles, joints, nervous system, and endocrine system is limitless. We just have to keep working out more. However, our ability to recover is extremely limited. Faced with this dilemma—and keeping in mind that recovery is eternal—we can choose to passively let nature take its course, or we can take control of the situation.
If you want to take charge, you can use these two strategies:
>Accelerate the regenerative process by using reminders.
>Get a head start on recovery.
Why Does Recovery Take So Long?
The length of recovery is the result of the rapid decrease in anabolism after a workout. Scientific studies show the following: In the 8 hours after a workout, recovery is very efficient; however, after that point, recovery slows down, and the speed of regeneration decreases exponentially. For example, if 48 hours are required for recovery after a given workout,
>85 percent of your physical capacity is recovered in 24 hours, and
>the other 15 percent requires an additional 24 hours.
If the speed of recovery during those first few hours were maintained, only 4 additional hours would be needed for a complete recovery. Unfortunately, we have to struggle with the inefficiency of the regenerative process; this process slows down too early, before completing its masterpiece.
The Concept of Reminders
We must find ways to maintain the recov-ery mechanisms until the body has completely recovered. The first way is to exploit the benefits of nontraumatic “reminders.”
Reminder Sets
Reminder sets involve performing just a few sets of an exercise to lightly work a recovering muscle. These sets should be long and light. Reminder sets are the best way to reenergize the anabolism process when it is slowing down. Instead of waiting for the complete recovery of a muscle group, you will gently retrain that muscle group during the recovery phase. If this work is truly not traumatic, there will be no negative effects. However, if you traumatize the muscle again, your recovery will be even further delayed. Sayers et al. (2000. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise 32(9):1587-92) showed that in the days after a very traumatic biceps workout, doing a light set of 50 repetitions daily accelerated recovery speed by 24 percent. Here are a few simple rules to follow when you want to rework a muscle without traumatizing it:
- Choose an isolation exercise rather than a compound exercise. This enables you to better focus your efforts.
- Opt for machines or cables so that you can avoid free weights. Free weights do not isolate muscles as well and can cause more trauma.
- Use a light weight and do a high number of repetitions. Your goal is to bring as much blood as possible to the muscle.
- Be very careful to use proper form while performing the exercise.
- Do no more than three sets with low intensity.
Reminder Stretching
Stretching can also strengthen waning anabolism. The advantage of stretching is that it is less tiring than a reminder set; the disadvantage is that it is also less productive. Ideally, you could combine stretching and reminder sets for maximum effectiveness. But do not go overboard either! Beyond a certain point, too many reminder sets will fatigue the muscle, not help it. Two to four sets of static stretches, held for 15 to 20 seconds, can be a good foundation to work with.
How Can You Integrate Recovery Reminders?
The arsenal of recovery can be implemented 24 to 48 hours after you have worked the muscle involved. Reminder sets can be included at the beginning of your regular training (as a warm-up) or at the end (as a cool-down). Stretches can be done both before and after a workout.
Get a Head Start On Recovery
Another strategy enables you to work a muscle again even if the muscle has not yet fully recovered. This partial-recovery approach allows you to increase the frequency of your workouts for a muscle while avoiding overtraining. It is primarily intended for experienced lifters who are suffering from recovery issues. This tactic involves using a single exercise for the muscle in each workout and alternating exercises every workout.
Read more from The Strength Training Anatomy Workout, Volume II by Frederic Delavier and Michael Gundill.
How Can You Strengthen a Weak Area?
Everyone has some muscles that do not develop as easily as other muscles.
How Can You Strengthen a Weak Area?
Everyone has some muscles that do not develop as easily as other muscles. When faced with a weak area that is resisting growth, many athletes get discouraged and say that they have tried everything without success. But do you think that they have actually tried everything? To avoid this negative attitude, remember that there is always something you can do to build up a weak area. You can always find new combinations and new techniques to try.
Classic Strategies for Building Up Weak Areas
As mentioned, we all have muscles that respond well to training—and other muscles that do not. To balance out your physique, you need to attack weak areas head on. Here are the classic strategies for building up a weak area:
- Working the delayed muscle first at the beginning of a workout (when you have the most energy and are most focused)
- Doing more sets
- Trying to increase the weight
More Radical Methods
Often, these classic techniques prove inadequate because they do not attack the problem at its root. They can help if the development gap is small, but they do not allow you to build up a muscle that is truly delayed. If you are faced with hypertrophy disparities that affect your muscles, it is better to adopt more radical measures. Above all, building up a weak area requires a good understanding of its causes.
True and False Work Areas
You may experience two kinds of weak areas: true and false.
- A false weak area is a muscle group that is less developed than other muscles because of ineffective training. The lack of volume in a muscle group can be explained by a lack of training or by workouts done in a rush or irregularly. This is often the case for the calves or the thighs. In general, correcting this kind of underdevelopment is relatively easy if you train the muscle regularly and intensely.
- A true weak area is a muscle that does not get bigger despite serious work. We will be focusing on this kind of weak area.
What Causes a True Weak Area?
In theory, muscles should all develop at the same speed, because the hormones and nutrients responsible for anabolism are found in equal concentrations in every muscle. But in reality, muscle growth is influenced more by localized physiological changes than by overall anabolism.
Root of the Problem
True weak areas are caused by three main factors:
- Genetics
- Athletic history
- Difficulties with muscle recruitment
GENETICS
Genetics influences the structure of your strong and weak areas in five ways:
UPPER BODY VERSUS LOWER BODY
Because of genetic factors, we can divide the body into two parts. Some people have an easier time developing the upper-body muscles, while others find it easier to develop the lower-body muscles. People rarely have perfect harmony between the upper and lower body. Even people who seem to have a balanced physique will always have an easier time with either the upper- or lower-body muscles. This is a strong tendency that few people can escape.
GENETIC ASYMMETRY
We are not symmetrical. Some muscles are always more developed on one side of the body than on the other side.
Do not worry if you discover that one of your arms is bigger than the other. The difference is sometimes a fraction of an inch, and sometimes half an inch. Our skeletons are not perfectly symmetrical either. For example, one collarbone might be bigger than the other. This lack of symmetry changes the lever in all upper-body exercises, particularly exercises for the shoulders, chest, and back. Naturally, this will affect strength and will therefore affect muscle development. Skeletal asymmetry may also be at the root of injuries, especially when performing exercises with a long bar.
Short Muscles, Long Muscles
The length of a muscle is one of the primary factors determining how much it can develop. The longer a muscle is (that is, the farther it runs from its insertion points), the easier it is to build the muscle.
On the contrary, the shorter a muscle is, the more difficult it is to develop. For example, muscle length can vary with the calves, which are perched high up on the tibia, or the biceps, which end far away from the forearm. Unfortunately, because muscle length is determined genetically, you cannot lengthen a muscle.
Fibrous Density and Development
The more fibers a muscle has, the bigger it is, even without strength training. During exercise, a dense muscle will react better than the same muscle with fewer fibers. Fortunately, the number of muscle fibers can be increased using these methods:
> Traumatic training strategies such as accentuated negatives.
> Nutritional supplements such as
whey protein, leucine, and creatine. When used just after each workout, these supplements can stimulate the manufacture of new satellite cells. As you continue exercising, these new cells transform into muscle fibers.
Difficulty With Muscle Pump
A direct relationship exists between a muscle's capacity to get pumped during exercise and how fast the muscle grows. The more a muscle swells during a set, the more quickly the muscle will grow. Muscles that have difficulty filling with blood when you work them will always lag behind in development. You can improve this factor by using long sets.
Athletic History
You have the power to influence your genetics. If you played sports when you were younger, the muscles that you used most often in those sports will be the easiest to develop through strength training.
For example, if you did a lot of push-ups when you were young, you will be able to build your chest and triceps faster than average when you start strength train-ing. Having an athletic history helps you become successful in strength training.
If you never played a sport, or if your sport did not precondition all of your muscles, you can use sets of 100 reps to compensate for the absence of this fundamental work.
Difficulty With Muscle Recruitment
Weak areas are generally muscles that you have difficulty feeling and, therefore, recruiting during exercise. This difficulty can be explained by three phenomena:
Blindly Following Dogma
Beware of the many deeply rooted beliefs about muscle recruitment in strength training. For example, one such belief is that the bench press is only a chest exercise. Another belief is that the more weight you push during the press, the larger your chest muscles will become. For lifters who have good chest muscles, these two hypotheses prove correct. But these same beliefs are also the cause of many weak chests.
How many people who strength train spend time learning how to recruit their chest muscles as much as possible during the bench press? Generally, lift-ers just try to use heavier and heav-ier weights in the hope that they will finally be able to build the chest they want. Unfortunately, this tactic does not always work, and it becomes a waste of time. This is true not only for the bench press but also for other compound exercises such as the squat (for building the quadriceps) and rowing or pulling (for building your back). Just because an exercise is supposed to work the upper pectoralis muscle or the brachialis does not mean that the muscle you are targeting will be automatically recruited.
Intermuscular Competition
A recruitment competition takes place among muscles. In a compound exercise such as the bench press—which recruits the arms, the shoulders, and the chest—the most developed muscles are always recruited first. For example, a person who has strong arms or strong shoulders will overrecruit them during the press portion of the exercise, to the detriment of the chest muscles.
Common Competitions Between Muscles
>Powerful arms could prevent the growth of the chest, the shoulders, and the back.
>Big forearms can interrupt the development of the biceps.
>A strong chest could make it difficult to build up the shoulders.
>Good shoulders are an obstacle to building the chest muscles.
>If the back of the shoulder is very thick, it could interfere with back work.
>Prominent buttocks can restrict the recruitment of the quadriceps and the hamstrings.
Imperfections in Muscle Recruitment
Each repetition, each set, and each workout leave their mark not only on the muscles, but also on the central nervous system.
Taken together, these traces constitute your motor behavior. If the bench press works your shoulders and your chest too much every time you do it, this flawed recruitment becomes more deeply ingrained. This will aggravate the problem instead of resolving it.
Read more from The Strength Training Anatomy Workout, Volume II by Frederic Delavier and Michael Gundill.
How to Dominate Your Muscles by Segmenting Them
You need to know whether each one of your muscles is polyarticular or monoarticular. To understand the difference, consider the example of the brachialis and the biceps.
Segmenting Muscles So You Can Dominate Them
You need to know whether each one of your muscles is polyarticular or monoarticular. To understand the difference, consider the example of the brachialis and the biceps:
>The brachialis is monoarticular, because it attaches to the forearm and the humerus (arm bone): It only covers a single joint.
>The biceps is polyarticular, because it attaches to the shoulder and the forearm (not to the humerus): It covers two joints.
To separate the various functions of polyarticular muscles, we can focus on the length-tension relationship. We will have to divide monoarticular groups in a more artificial manner.
The Length-Tension Relationship
The tension (strength) of a muscle is not uniform. When a muscle is stretched to the extreme, it has very little strength. The same thing happens when a muscle is shortened to its maximum. We can conclude that somewhere between these two extremes is the point where a muscle has the best chance to express its strength. So each muscle has an optimal length at which it can mobilize its maximum power. The farther you stretch the muscle from its optimal length (either by stretching or by contracting), the less effective it will be. This means that you will not be able to recruit it and contract it with power.
The concept of the length-tension relationship might seem abstract, but you must understand it when you are working polyarticular muscles such as the biceps, triceps, hamstrings, and calves.
Segmenting the Biceps
The biceps is made up of two heads (parts). With the strategy of segmentation, the idea is to separate the workouts for these two heads so that you work one head while the other head is recovering, and vice versa. This way, you can work the biceps more often, despite an incomplete recovery.
In practice, when you push your elbow toward the back, the following occurs:
>The long head of the biceps (outer part) is placed in a favorable length-tension position.
> The short head of the biceps (inner part) is placed in an unfavorable length-tension position.
result:The long head takes control, leav-ing the short head less able to contract. The benchmark exercise here is an incline curl done on a bench (as flat as possible) using a dumbbell.
However, when the elbow is in front of the body, the following occurs:
>The short head of the biceps works first.
>The long head has more difficulty getting involved.
This is the case with most biceps machines and Scott curl benches. So, by changing the stretch in your biceps, you change each head's ability to participate in the movement. When you work out, you can do either of these:
>Work the biceps from both angles.
>Work the biceps from only one angle.
If you are focusing on only one angle, the first workout can target the short head, and the second workout can focus on the long head. For the third workout, begin the cycle again.
Segmenting the Triceps
The long head of the triceps (inner part) is polyarticular. The other two heads are monoarticular. To increase the recruitment of the long head, you need to stretch it, which puts it in a favorable length-
tension position. To do this, you must choose triceps exercises where your arms are placed close to your head. During the next workout, you can accentuate the work of the other two heads by putting your arms alongside your body with your elbows as far back as possible.
Segmenting the Shoulders
Even though the deltoid is monoarticular, this muscle can be divided into three parts:
>The front (anterior)
>The side (lateral or middle)
>The back (posterior)
The first workout, based on presses, will target the front part of the shoulder. The second workout will focus on the back part, and the third will work the side. Then you will begin the cycle again.
Segmenting the Back
In strength training, most people think there are two main categories of back exercises:
>Those that work on size (primarily the latissimus dorsi)
>Those that work on thickness (trape-ius and rhomboids)
This distinction, even though it is very artificial, will work for our purposes. Instead of combining pull-ups and rows in every workout, you can devote the first workout to pull-ups (for size) and leave the rows (targeting thickness) for the next workout.
Segmenting the Chest
The chest can be divided into two sections:
>The upper section
>The lower section
People often try to stimulate both sections every time they work out. However, you should try to concentrate on only one part in each workout. For this segmentation technique to work effectively, you must have already learned how to isolate the upper part of your chest. The easiest way to learn this is to perform light cable work that targets the section of the pectoralis major nearest to the clavicle.
Segmenting the Abdominal Muscles
Segmenting the abdominal muscles is easy. You need to work these sections:
>The upper section
>The lower section
Therefore, alternating between specific exercises for each region is very simple.
Segmenting the Calves
The gastrocnemius muscles are polyarticular, but the soleus is monoarticular. If you work from a seated position, you make your gastrocnemius muscles soft, and they can no longer contract.
However, the straighter your legs are, the more the gastrocnemius muscles will be stimulated. Ideally, you should lean forward (as in donkey calf raises or leg presses) to find the ideal length-tension position for the gastrocnemius muscles. You can do one workout with straight legs and another workout while seated with bent legs.
Segmenting the Hamstrings
The hamstrings have two functions:
>To flex the leg (e.g., in leg curls)
>To straighten the torso (e.g., in a deadlift)
Focus on the first function during one workout, and then focus on the second function during the next workout.
Segmenting the Quadriceps
Our strategy of dividing muscles into parts does not work here because it is difficult to divide up quadriceps exercises. Instead, you can use a strategy of alternating between using machines and using a bar. This will allow you to rotate through three main exercises:
>Squats
>Leg presses
>Hack squats
Instead of using two or three exercises per workout, you should concentrate on only one exercise.
Read more from The Strength Training Anatomy Workout, Volume II by Frederic Delavier and Michael Gundill.
How to Accelerate Recovery
Our ability to tire out our muscles, joints, nervous system, and endocrine system is limitless.
Strategies to Accelerate Recovery
Our ability to tire out our muscles, joints, nervous system, and endocrine system is limitless. We just have to keep working out more. However, our ability to recover is extremely limited. Faced with this dilemma—and keeping in mind that recovery is eternal—we can choose to passively let nature take its course, or we can take control of the situation.
If you want to take charge, you can use these two strategies:
>Accelerate the regenerative process by using reminders.
>Get a head start on recovery.
Why Does Recovery Take So Long?
The length of recovery is the result of the rapid decrease in anabolism after a workout. Scientific studies show the following: In the 8 hours after a workout, recovery is very efficient; however, after that point, recovery slows down, and the speed of regeneration decreases exponentially. For example, if 48 hours are required for recovery after a given workout,
>85 percent of your physical capacity is recovered in 24 hours, and
>the other 15 percent requires an additional 24 hours.
If the speed of recovery during those first few hours were maintained, only 4 additional hours would be needed for a complete recovery. Unfortunately, we have to struggle with the inefficiency of the regenerative process; this process slows down too early, before completing its masterpiece.
The Concept of Reminders
We must find ways to maintain the recov-ery mechanisms until the body has completely recovered. The first way is to exploit the benefits of nontraumatic “reminders.”
Reminder Sets
Reminder sets involve performing just a few sets of an exercise to lightly work a recovering muscle. These sets should be long and light. Reminder sets are the best way to reenergize the anabolism process when it is slowing down. Instead of waiting for the complete recovery of a muscle group, you will gently retrain that muscle group during the recovery phase. If this work is truly not traumatic, there will be no negative effects. However, if you traumatize the muscle again, your recovery will be even further delayed. Sayers et al. (2000. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise 32(9):1587-92) showed that in the days after a very traumatic biceps workout, doing a light set of 50 repetitions daily accelerated recovery speed by 24 percent. Here are a few simple rules to follow when you want to rework a muscle without traumatizing it:
- Choose an isolation exercise rather than a compound exercise. This enables you to better focus your efforts.
- Opt for machines or cables so that you can avoid free weights. Free weights do not isolate muscles as well and can cause more trauma.
- Use a light weight and do a high number of repetitions. Your goal is to bring as much blood as possible to the muscle.
- Be very careful to use proper form while performing the exercise.
- Do no more than three sets with low intensity.
Reminder Stretching
Stretching can also strengthen waning anabolism. The advantage of stretching is that it is less tiring than a reminder set; the disadvantage is that it is also less productive. Ideally, you could combine stretching and reminder sets for maximum effectiveness. But do not go overboard either! Beyond a certain point, too many reminder sets will fatigue the muscle, not help it. Two to four sets of static stretches, held for 15 to 20 seconds, can be a good foundation to work with.
How Can You Integrate Recovery Reminders?
The arsenal of recovery can be implemented 24 to 48 hours after you have worked the muscle involved. Reminder sets can be included at the beginning of your regular training (as a warm-up) or at the end (as a cool-down). Stretches can be done both before and after a workout.
Get a Head Start On Recovery
Another strategy enables you to work a muscle again even if the muscle has not yet fully recovered. This partial-recovery approach allows you to increase the frequency of your workouts for a muscle while avoiding overtraining. It is primarily intended for experienced lifters who are suffering from recovery issues. This tactic involves using a single exercise for the muscle in each workout and alternating exercises every workout.
Read more from The Strength Training Anatomy Workout, Volume II by Frederic Delavier and Michael Gundill.
How Can You Strengthen a Weak Area?
Everyone has some muscles that do not develop as easily as other muscles.
How Can You Strengthen a Weak Area?
Everyone has some muscles that do not develop as easily as other muscles. When faced with a weak area that is resisting growth, many athletes get discouraged and say that they have tried everything without success. But do you think that they have actually tried everything? To avoid this negative attitude, remember that there is always something you can do to build up a weak area. You can always find new combinations and new techniques to try.
Classic Strategies for Building Up Weak Areas
As mentioned, we all have muscles that respond well to training—and other muscles that do not. To balance out your physique, you need to attack weak areas head on. Here are the classic strategies for building up a weak area:
- Working the delayed muscle first at the beginning of a workout (when you have the most energy and are most focused)
- Doing more sets
- Trying to increase the weight
More Radical Methods
Often, these classic techniques prove inadequate because they do not attack the problem at its root. They can help if the development gap is small, but they do not allow you to build up a muscle that is truly delayed. If you are faced with hypertrophy disparities that affect your muscles, it is better to adopt more radical measures. Above all, building up a weak area requires a good understanding of its causes.
True and False Work Areas
You may experience two kinds of weak areas: true and false.
- A false weak area is a muscle group that is less developed than other muscles because of ineffective training. The lack of volume in a muscle group can be explained by a lack of training or by workouts done in a rush or irregularly. This is often the case for the calves or the thighs. In general, correcting this kind of underdevelopment is relatively easy if you train the muscle regularly and intensely.
- A true weak area is a muscle that does not get bigger despite serious work. We will be focusing on this kind of weak area.
What Causes a True Weak Area?
In theory, muscles should all develop at the same speed, because the hormones and nutrients responsible for anabolism are found in equal concentrations in every muscle. But in reality, muscle growth is influenced more by localized physiological changes than by overall anabolism.
Root of the Problem
True weak areas are caused by three main factors:
- Genetics
- Athletic history
- Difficulties with muscle recruitment
GENETICS
Genetics influences the structure of your strong and weak areas in five ways:
UPPER BODY VERSUS LOWER BODY
Because of genetic factors, we can divide the body into two parts. Some people have an easier time developing the upper-body muscles, while others find it easier to develop the lower-body muscles. People rarely have perfect harmony between the upper and lower body. Even people who seem to have a balanced physique will always have an easier time with either the upper- or lower-body muscles. This is a strong tendency that few people can escape.
GENETIC ASYMMETRY
We are not symmetrical. Some muscles are always more developed on one side of the body than on the other side.
Do not worry if you discover that one of your arms is bigger than the other. The difference is sometimes a fraction of an inch, and sometimes half an inch. Our skeletons are not perfectly symmetrical either. For example, one collarbone might be bigger than the other. This lack of symmetry changes the lever in all upper-body exercises, particularly exercises for the shoulders, chest, and back. Naturally, this will affect strength and will therefore affect muscle development. Skeletal asymmetry may also be at the root of injuries, especially when performing exercises with a long bar.
Short Muscles, Long Muscles
The length of a muscle is one of the primary factors determining how much it can develop. The longer a muscle is (that is, the farther it runs from its insertion points), the easier it is to build the muscle.
On the contrary, the shorter a muscle is, the more difficult it is to develop. For example, muscle length can vary with the calves, which are perched high up on the tibia, or the biceps, which end far away from the forearm. Unfortunately, because muscle length is determined genetically, you cannot lengthen a muscle.
Fibrous Density and Development
The more fibers a muscle has, the bigger it is, even without strength training. During exercise, a dense muscle will react better than the same muscle with fewer fibers. Fortunately, the number of muscle fibers can be increased using these methods:
> Traumatic training strategies such as accentuated negatives.
> Nutritional supplements such as
whey protein, leucine, and creatine. When used just after each workout, these supplements can stimulate the manufacture of new satellite cells. As you continue exercising, these new cells transform into muscle fibers.
Difficulty With Muscle Pump
A direct relationship exists between a muscle's capacity to get pumped during exercise and how fast the muscle grows. The more a muscle swells during a set, the more quickly the muscle will grow. Muscles that have difficulty filling with blood when you work them will always lag behind in development. You can improve this factor by using long sets.
Athletic History
You have the power to influence your genetics. If you played sports when you were younger, the muscles that you used most often in those sports will be the easiest to develop through strength training.
For example, if you did a lot of push-ups when you were young, you will be able to build your chest and triceps faster than average when you start strength train-ing. Having an athletic history helps you become successful in strength training.
If you never played a sport, or if your sport did not precondition all of your muscles, you can use sets of 100 reps to compensate for the absence of this fundamental work.
Difficulty With Muscle Recruitment
Weak areas are generally muscles that you have difficulty feeling and, therefore, recruiting during exercise. This difficulty can be explained by three phenomena:
Blindly Following Dogma
Beware of the many deeply rooted beliefs about muscle recruitment in strength training. For example, one such belief is that the bench press is only a chest exercise. Another belief is that the more weight you push during the press, the larger your chest muscles will become. For lifters who have good chest muscles, these two hypotheses prove correct. But these same beliefs are also the cause of many weak chests.
How many people who strength train spend time learning how to recruit their chest muscles as much as possible during the bench press? Generally, lift-ers just try to use heavier and heav-ier weights in the hope that they will finally be able to build the chest they want. Unfortunately, this tactic does not always work, and it becomes a waste of time. This is true not only for the bench press but also for other compound exercises such as the squat (for building the quadriceps) and rowing or pulling (for building your back). Just because an exercise is supposed to work the upper pectoralis muscle or the brachialis does not mean that the muscle you are targeting will be automatically recruited.
Intermuscular Competition
A recruitment competition takes place among muscles. In a compound exercise such as the bench press—which recruits the arms, the shoulders, and the chest—the most developed muscles are always recruited first. For example, a person who has strong arms or strong shoulders will overrecruit them during the press portion of the exercise, to the detriment of the chest muscles.
Common Competitions Between Muscles
>Powerful arms could prevent the growth of the chest, the shoulders, and the back.
>Big forearms can interrupt the development of the biceps.
>A strong chest could make it difficult to build up the shoulders.
>Good shoulders are an obstacle to building the chest muscles.
>If the back of the shoulder is very thick, it could interfere with back work.
>Prominent buttocks can restrict the recruitment of the quadriceps and the hamstrings.
Imperfections in Muscle Recruitment
Each repetition, each set, and each workout leave their mark not only on the muscles, but also on the central nervous system.
Taken together, these traces constitute your motor behavior. If the bench press works your shoulders and your chest too much every time you do it, this flawed recruitment becomes more deeply ingrained. This will aggravate the problem instead of resolving it.
Read more from The Strength Training Anatomy Workout, Volume II by Frederic Delavier and Michael Gundill.
How to Dominate Your Muscles by Segmenting Them
You need to know whether each one of your muscles is polyarticular or monoarticular. To understand the difference, consider the example of the brachialis and the biceps.
Segmenting Muscles So You Can Dominate Them
You need to know whether each one of your muscles is polyarticular or monoarticular. To understand the difference, consider the example of the brachialis and the biceps:
>The brachialis is monoarticular, because it attaches to the forearm and the humerus (arm bone): It only covers a single joint.
>The biceps is polyarticular, because it attaches to the shoulder and the forearm (not to the humerus): It covers two joints.
To separate the various functions of polyarticular muscles, we can focus on the length-tension relationship. We will have to divide monoarticular groups in a more artificial manner.
The Length-Tension Relationship
The tension (strength) of a muscle is not uniform. When a muscle is stretched to the extreme, it has very little strength. The same thing happens when a muscle is shortened to its maximum. We can conclude that somewhere between these two extremes is the point where a muscle has the best chance to express its strength. So each muscle has an optimal length at which it can mobilize its maximum power. The farther you stretch the muscle from its optimal length (either by stretching or by contracting), the less effective it will be. This means that you will not be able to recruit it and contract it with power.
The concept of the length-tension relationship might seem abstract, but you must understand it when you are working polyarticular muscles such as the biceps, triceps, hamstrings, and calves.
Segmenting the Biceps
The biceps is made up of two heads (parts). With the strategy of segmentation, the idea is to separate the workouts for these two heads so that you work one head while the other head is recovering, and vice versa. This way, you can work the biceps more often, despite an incomplete recovery.
In practice, when you push your elbow toward the back, the following occurs:
>The long head of the biceps (outer part) is placed in a favorable length-tension position.
> The short head of the biceps (inner part) is placed in an unfavorable length-tension position.
result:The long head takes control, leav-ing the short head less able to contract. The benchmark exercise here is an incline curl done on a bench (as flat as possible) using a dumbbell.
However, when the elbow is in front of the body, the following occurs:
>The short head of the biceps works first.
>The long head has more difficulty getting involved.
This is the case with most biceps machines and Scott curl benches. So, by changing the stretch in your biceps, you change each head's ability to participate in the movement. When you work out, you can do either of these:
>Work the biceps from both angles.
>Work the biceps from only one angle.
If you are focusing on only one angle, the first workout can target the short head, and the second workout can focus on the long head. For the third workout, begin the cycle again.
Segmenting the Triceps
The long head of the triceps (inner part) is polyarticular. The other two heads are monoarticular. To increase the recruitment of the long head, you need to stretch it, which puts it in a favorable length-
tension position. To do this, you must choose triceps exercises where your arms are placed close to your head. During the next workout, you can accentuate the work of the other two heads by putting your arms alongside your body with your elbows as far back as possible.
Segmenting the Shoulders
Even though the deltoid is monoarticular, this muscle can be divided into three parts:
>The front (anterior)
>The side (lateral or middle)
>The back (posterior)
The first workout, based on presses, will target the front part of the shoulder. The second workout will focus on the back part, and the third will work the side. Then you will begin the cycle again.
Segmenting the Back
In strength training, most people think there are two main categories of back exercises:
>Those that work on size (primarily the latissimus dorsi)
>Those that work on thickness (trape-ius and rhomboids)
This distinction, even though it is very artificial, will work for our purposes. Instead of combining pull-ups and rows in every workout, you can devote the first workout to pull-ups (for size) and leave the rows (targeting thickness) for the next workout.
Segmenting the Chest
The chest can be divided into two sections:
>The upper section
>The lower section
People often try to stimulate both sections every time they work out. However, you should try to concentrate on only one part in each workout. For this segmentation technique to work effectively, you must have already learned how to isolate the upper part of your chest. The easiest way to learn this is to perform light cable work that targets the section of the pectoralis major nearest to the clavicle.
Segmenting the Abdominal Muscles
Segmenting the abdominal muscles is easy. You need to work these sections:
>The upper section
>The lower section
Therefore, alternating between specific exercises for each region is very simple.
Segmenting the Calves
The gastrocnemius muscles are polyarticular, but the soleus is monoarticular. If you work from a seated position, you make your gastrocnemius muscles soft, and they can no longer contract.
However, the straighter your legs are, the more the gastrocnemius muscles will be stimulated. Ideally, you should lean forward (as in donkey calf raises or leg presses) to find the ideal length-tension position for the gastrocnemius muscles. You can do one workout with straight legs and another workout while seated with bent legs.
Segmenting the Hamstrings
The hamstrings have two functions:
>To flex the leg (e.g., in leg curls)
>To straighten the torso (e.g., in a deadlift)
Focus on the first function during one workout, and then focus on the second function during the next workout.
Segmenting the Quadriceps
Our strategy of dividing muscles into parts does not work here because it is difficult to divide up quadriceps exercises. Instead, you can use a strategy of alternating between using machines and using a bar. This will allow you to rotate through three main exercises:
>Squats
>Leg presses
>Hack squats
Instead of using two or three exercises per workout, you should concentrate on only one exercise.
Read more from The Strength Training Anatomy Workout, Volume II by Frederic Delavier and Michael Gundill.
How to Accelerate Recovery
Our ability to tire out our muscles, joints, nervous system, and endocrine system is limitless.
Strategies to Accelerate Recovery
Our ability to tire out our muscles, joints, nervous system, and endocrine system is limitless. We just have to keep working out more. However, our ability to recover is extremely limited. Faced with this dilemma—and keeping in mind that recovery is eternal—we can choose to passively let nature take its course, or we can take control of the situation.
If you want to take charge, you can use these two strategies:
>Accelerate the regenerative process by using reminders.
>Get a head start on recovery.
Why Does Recovery Take So Long?
The length of recovery is the result of the rapid decrease in anabolism after a workout. Scientific studies show the following: In the 8 hours after a workout, recovery is very efficient; however, after that point, recovery slows down, and the speed of regeneration decreases exponentially. For example, if 48 hours are required for recovery after a given workout,
>85 percent of your physical capacity is recovered in 24 hours, and
>the other 15 percent requires an additional 24 hours.
If the speed of recovery during those first few hours were maintained, only 4 additional hours would be needed for a complete recovery. Unfortunately, we have to struggle with the inefficiency of the regenerative process; this process slows down too early, before completing its masterpiece.
The Concept of Reminders
We must find ways to maintain the recov-ery mechanisms until the body has completely recovered. The first way is to exploit the benefits of nontraumatic “reminders.”
Reminder Sets
Reminder sets involve performing just a few sets of an exercise to lightly work a recovering muscle. These sets should be long and light. Reminder sets are the best way to reenergize the anabolism process when it is slowing down. Instead of waiting for the complete recovery of a muscle group, you will gently retrain that muscle group during the recovery phase. If this work is truly not traumatic, there will be no negative effects. However, if you traumatize the muscle again, your recovery will be even further delayed. Sayers et al. (2000. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise 32(9):1587-92) showed that in the days after a very traumatic biceps workout, doing a light set of 50 repetitions daily accelerated recovery speed by 24 percent. Here are a few simple rules to follow when you want to rework a muscle without traumatizing it:
- Choose an isolation exercise rather than a compound exercise. This enables you to better focus your efforts.
- Opt for machines or cables so that you can avoid free weights. Free weights do not isolate muscles as well and can cause more trauma.
- Use a light weight and do a high number of repetitions. Your goal is to bring as much blood as possible to the muscle.
- Be very careful to use proper form while performing the exercise.
- Do no more than three sets with low intensity.
Reminder Stretching
Stretching can also strengthen waning anabolism. The advantage of stretching is that it is less tiring than a reminder set; the disadvantage is that it is also less productive. Ideally, you could combine stretching and reminder sets for maximum effectiveness. But do not go overboard either! Beyond a certain point, too many reminder sets will fatigue the muscle, not help it. Two to four sets of static stretches, held for 15 to 20 seconds, can be a good foundation to work with.
How Can You Integrate Recovery Reminders?
The arsenal of recovery can be implemented 24 to 48 hours after you have worked the muscle involved. Reminder sets can be included at the beginning of your regular training (as a warm-up) or at the end (as a cool-down). Stretches can be done both before and after a workout.
Get a Head Start On Recovery
Another strategy enables you to work a muscle again even if the muscle has not yet fully recovered. This partial-recovery approach allows you to increase the frequency of your workouts for a muscle while avoiding overtraining. It is primarily intended for experienced lifters who are suffering from recovery issues. This tactic involves using a single exercise for the muscle in each workout and alternating exercises every workout.
Read more from The Strength Training Anatomy Workout, Volume II by Frederic Delavier and Michael Gundill.
How Can You Strengthen a Weak Area?
Everyone has some muscles that do not develop as easily as other muscles.
How Can You Strengthen a Weak Area?
Everyone has some muscles that do not develop as easily as other muscles. When faced with a weak area that is resisting growth, many athletes get discouraged and say that they have tried everything without success. But do you think that they have actually tried everything? To avoid this negative attitude, remember that there is always something you can do to build up a weak area. You can always find new combinations and new techniques to try.
Classic Strategies for Building Up Weak Areas
As mentioned, we all have muscles that respond well to training—and other muscles that do not. To balance out your physique, you need to attack weak areas head on. Here are the classic strategies for building up a weak area:
- Working the delayed muscle first at the beginning of a workout (when you have the most energy and are most focused)
- Doing more sets
- Trying to increase the weight
More Radical Methods
Often, these classic techniques prove inadequate because they do not attack the problem at its root. They can help if the development gap is small, but they do not allow you to build up a muscle that is truly delayed. If you are faced with hypertrophy disparities that affect your muscles, it is better to adopt more radical measures. Above all, building up a weak area requires a good understanding of its causes.
True and False Work Areas
You may experience two kinds of weak areas: true and false.
- A false weak area is a muscle group that is less developed than other muscles because of ineffective training. The lack of volume in a muscle group can be explained by a lack of training or by workouts done in a rush or irregularly. This is often the case for the calves or the thighs. In general, correcting this kind of underdevelopment is relatively easy if you train the muscle regularly and intensely.
- A true weak area is a muscle that does not get bigger despite serious work. We will be focusing on this kind of weak area.
What Causes a True Weak Area?
In theory, muscles should all develop at the same speed, because the hormones and nutrients responsible for anabolism are found in equal concentrations in every muscle. But in reality, muscle growth is influenced more by localized physiological changes than by overall anabolism.
Root of the Problem
True weak areas are caused by three main factors:
- Genetics
- Athletic history
- Difficulties with muscle recruitment
GENETICS
Genetics influences the structure of your strong and weak areas in five ways:
UPPER BODY VERSUS LOWER BODY
Because of genetic factors, we can divide the body into two parts. Some people have an easier time developing the upper-body muscles, while others find it easier to develop the lower-body muscles. People rarely have perfect harmony between the upper and lower body. Even people who seem to have a balanced physique will always have an easier time with either the upper- or lower-body muscles. This is a strong tendency that few people can escape.
GENETIC ASYMMETRY
We are not symmetrical. Some muscles are always more developed on one side of the body than on the other side.
Do not worry if you discover that one of your arms is bigger than the other. The difference is sometimes a fraction of an inch, and sometimes half an inch. Our skeletons are not perfectly symmetrical either. For example, one collarbone might be bigger than the other. This lack of symmetry changes the lever in all upper-body exercises, particularly exercises for the shoulders, chest, and back. Naturally, this will affect strength and will therefore affect muscle development. Skeletal asymmetry may also be at the root of injuries, especially when performing exercises with a long bar.
Short Muscles, Long Muscles
The length of a muscle is one of the primary factors determining how much it can develop. The longer a muscle is (that is, the farther it runs from its insertion points), the easier it is to build the muscle.
On the contrary, the shorter a muscle is, the more difficult it is to develop. For example, muscle length can vary with the calves, which are perched high up on the tibia, or the biceps, which end far away from the forearm. Unfortunately, because muscle length is determined genetically, you cannot lengthen a muscle.
Fibrous Density and Development
The more fibers a muscle has, the bigger it is, even without strength training. During exercise, a dense muscle will react better than the same muscle with fewer fibers. Fortunately, the number of muscle fibers can be increased using these methods:
> Traumatic training strategies such as accentuated negatives.
> Nutritional supplements such as
whey protein, leucine, and creatine. When used just after each workout, these supplements can stimulate the manufacture of new satellite cells. As you continue exercising, these new cells transform into muscle fibers.
Difficulty With Muscle Pump
A direct relationship exists between a muscle's capacity to get pumped during exercise and how fast the muscle grows. The more a muscle swells during a set, the more quickly the muscle will grow. Muscles that have difficulty filling with blood when you work them will always lag behind in development. You can improve this factor by using long sets.
Athletic History
You have the power to influence your genetics. If you played sports when you were younger, the muscles that you used most often in those sports will be the easiest to develop through strength training.
For example, if you did a lot of push-ups when you were young, you will be able to build your chest and triceps faster than average when you start strength train-ing. Having an athletic history helps you become successful in strength training.
If you never played a sport, or if your sport did not precondition all of your muscles, you can use sets of 100 reps to compensate for the absence of this fundamental work.
Difficulty With Muscle Recruitment
Weak areas are generally muscles that you have difficulty feeling and, therefore, recruiting during exercise. This difficulty can be explained by three phenomena:
Blindly Following Dogma
Beware of the many deeply rooted beliefs about muscle recruitment in strength training. For example, one such belief is that the bench press is only a chest exercise. Another belief is that the more weight you push during the press, the larger your chest muscles will become. For lifters who have good chest muscles, these two hypotheses prove correct. But these same beliefs are also the cause of many weak chests.
How many people who strength train spend time learning how to recruit their chest muscles as much as possible during the bench press? Generally, lift-ers just try to use heavier and heav-ier weights in the hope that they will finally be able to build the chest they want. Unfortunately, this tactic does not always work, and it becomes a waste of time. This is true not only for the bench press but also for other compound exercises such as the squat (for building the quadriceps) and rowing or pulling (for building your back). Just because an exercise is supposed to work the upper pectoralis muscle or the brachialis does not mean that the muscle you are targeting will be automatically recruited.
Intermuscular Competition
A recruitment competition takes place among muscles. In a compound exercise such as the bench press—which recruits the arms, the shoulders, and the chest—the most developed muscles are always recruited first. For example, a person who has strong arms or strong shoulders will overrecruit them during the press portion of the exercise, to the detriment of the chest muscles.
Common Competitions Between Muscles
>Powerful arms could prevent the growth of the chest, the shoulders, and the back.
>Big forearms can interrupt the development of the biceps.
>A strong chest could make it difficult to build up the shoulders.
>Good shoulders are an obstacle to building the chest muscles.
>If the back of the shoulder is very thick, it could interfere with back work.
>Prominent buttocks can restrict the recruitment of the quadriceps and the hamstrings.
Imperfections in Muscle Recruitment
Each repetition, each set, and each workout leave their mark not only on the muscles, but also on the central nervous system.
Taken together, these traces constitute your motor behavior. If the bench press works your shoulders and your chest too much every time you do it, this flawed recruitment becomes more deeply ingrained. This will aggravate the problem instead of resolving it.
Read more from The Strength Training Anatomy Workout, Volume II by Frederic Delavier and Michael Gundill.
How to Dominate Your Muscles by Segmenting Them
You need to know whether each one of your muscles is polyarticular or monoarticular. To understand the difference, consider the example of the brachialis and the biceps.
Segmenting Muscles So You Can Dominate Them
You need to know whether each one of your muscles is polyarticular or monoarticular. To understand the difference, consider the example of the brachialis and the biceps:
>The brachialis is monoarticular, because it attaches to the forearm and the humerus (arm bone): It only covers a single joint.
>The biceps is polyarticular, because it attaches to the shoulder and the forearm (not to the humerus): It covers two joints.
To separate the various functions of polyarticular muscles, we can focus on the length-tension relationship. We will have to divide monoarticular groups in a more artificial manner.
The Length-Tension Relationship
The tension (strength) of a muscle is not uniform. When a muscle is stretched to the extreme, it has very little strength. The same thing happens when a muscle is shortened to its maximum. We can conclude that somewhere between these two extremes is the point where a muscle has the best chance to express its strength. So each muscle has an optimal length at which it can mobilize its maximum power. The farther you stretch the muscle from its optimal length (either by stretching or by contracting), the less effective it will be. This means that you will not be able to recruit it and contract it with power.
The concept of the length-tension relationship might seem abstract, but you must understand it when you are working polyarticular muscles such as the biceps, triceps, hamstrings, and calves.
Segmenting the Biceps
The biceps is made up of two heads (parts). With the strategy of segmentation, the idea is to separate the workouts for these two heads so that you work one head while the other head is recovering, and vice versa. This way, you can work the biceps more often, despite an incomplete recovery.
In practice, when you push your elbow toward the back, the following occurs:
>The long head of the biceps (outer part) is placed in a favorable length-tension position.
> The short head of the biceps (inner part) is placed in an unfavorable length-tension position.
result:The long head takes control, leav-ing the short head less able to contract. The benchmark exercise here is an incline curl done on a bench (as flat as possible) using a dumbbell.
However, when the elbow is in front of the body, the following occurs:
>The short head of the biceps works first.
>The long head has more difficulty getting involved.
This is the case with most biceps machines and Scott curl benches. So, by changing the stretch in your biceps, you change each head's ability to participate in the movement. When you work out, you can do either of these:
>Work the biceps from both angles.
>Work the biceps from only one angle.
If you are focusing on only one angle, the first workout can target the short head, and the second workout can focus on the long head. For the third workout, begin the cycle again.
Segmenting the Triceps
The long head of the triceps (inner part) is polyarticular. The other two heads are monoarticular. To increase the recruitment of the long head, you need to stretch it, which puts it in a favorable length-
tension position. To do this, you must choose triceps exercises where your arms are placed close to your head. During the next workout, you can accentuate the work of the other two heads by putting your arms alongside your body with your elbows as far back as possible.
Segmenting the Shoulders
Even though the deltoid is monoarticular, this muscle can be divided into three parts:
>The front (anterior)
>The side (lateral or middle)
>The back (posterior)
The first workout, based on presses, will target the front part of the shoulder. The second workout will focus on the back part, and the third will work the side. Then you will begin the cycle again.
Segmenting the Back
In strength training, most people think there are two main categories of back exercises:
>Those that work on size (primarily the latissimus dorsi)
>Those that work on thickness (trape-ius and rhomboids)
This distinction, even though it is very artificial, will work for our purposes. Instead of combining pull-ups and rows in every workout, you can devote the first workout to pull-ups (for size) and leave the rows (targeting thickness) for the next workout.
Segmenting the Chest
The chest can be divided into two sections:
>The upper section
>The lower section
People often try to stimulate both sections every time they work out. However, you should try to concentrate on only one part in each workout. For this segmentation technique to work effectively, you must have already learned how to isolate the upper part of your chest. The easiest way to learn this is to perform light cable work that targets the section of the pectoralis major nearest to the clavicle.
Segmenting the Abdominal Muscles
Segmenting the abdominal muscles is easy. You need to work these sections:
>The upper section
>The lower section
Therefore, alternating between specific exercises for each region is very simple.
Segmenting the Calves
The gastrocnemius muscles are polyarticular, but the soleus is monoarticular. If you work from a seated position, you make your gastrocnemius muscles soft, and they can no longer contract.
However, the straighter your legs are, the more the gastrocnemius muscles will be stimulated. Ideally, you should lean forward (as in donkey calf raises or leg presses) to find the ideal length-tension position for the gastrocnemius muscles. You can do one workout with straight legs and another workout while seated with bent legs.
Segmenting the Hamstrings
The hamstrings have two functions:
>To flex the leg (e.g., in leg curls)
>To straighten the torso (e.g., in a deadlift)
Focus on the first function during one workout, and then focus on the second function during the next workout.
Segmenting the Quadriceps
Our strategy of dividing muscles into parts does not work here because it is difficult to divide up quadriceps exercises. Instead, you can use a strategy of alternating between using machines and using a bar. This will allow you to rotate through three main exercises:
>Squats
>Leg presses
>Hack squats
Instead of using two or three exercises per workout, you should concentrate on only one exercise.
Read more from The Strength Training Anatomy Workout, Volume II by Frederic Delavier and Michael Gundill.
How to Accelerate Recovery
Our ability to tire out our muscles, joints, nervous system, and endocrine system is limitless.
Strategies to Accelerate Recovery
Our ability to tire out our muscles, joints, nervous system, and endocrine system is limitless. We just have to keep working out more. However, our ability to recover is extremely limited. Faced with this dilemma—and keeping in mind that recovery is eternal—we can choose to passively let nature take its course, or we can take control of the situation.
If you want to take charge, you can use these two strategies:
>Accelerate the regenerative process by using reminders.
>Get a head start on recovery.
Why Does Recovery Take So Long?
The length of recovery is the result of the rapid decrease in anabolism after a workout. Scientific studies show the following: In the 8 hours after a workout, recovery is very efficient; however, after that point, recovery slows down, and the speed of regeneration decreases exponentially. For example, if 48 hours are required for recovery after a given workout,
>85 percent of your physical capacity is recovered in 24 hours, and
>the other 15 percent requires an additional 24 hours.
If the speed of recovery during those first few hours were maintained, only 4 additional hours would be needed for a complete recovery. Unfortunately, we have to struggle with the inefficiency of the regenerative process; this process slows down too early, before completing its masterpiece.
The Concept of Reminders
We must find ways to maintain the recov-ery mechanisms until the body has completely recovered. The first way is to exploit the benefits of nontraumatic “reminders.”
Reminder Sets
Reminder sets involve performing just a few sets of an exercise to lightly work a recovering muscle. These sets should be long and light. Reminder sets are the best way to reenergize the anabolism process when it is slowing down. Instead of waiting for the complete recovery of a muscle group, you will gently retrain that muscle group during the recovery phase. If this work is truly not traumatic, there will be no negative effects. However, if you traumatize the muscle again, your recovery will be even further delayed. Sayers et al. (2000. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise 32(9):1587-92) showed that in the days after a very traumatic biceps workout, doing a light set of 50 repetitions daily accelerated recovery speed by 24 percent. Here are a few simple rules to follow when you want to rework a muscle without traumatizing it:
- Choose an isolation exercise rather than a compound exercise. This enables you to better focus your efforts.
- Opt for machines or cables so that you can avoid free weights. Free weights do not isolate muscles as well and can cause more trauma.
- Use a light weight and do a high number of repetitions. Your goal is to bring as much blood as possible to the muscle.
- Be very careful to use proper form while performing the exercise.
- Do no more than three sets with low intensity.
Reminder Stretching
Stretching can also strengthen waning anabolism. The advantage of stretching is that it is less tiring than a reminder set; the disadvantage is that it is also less productive. Ideally, you could combine stretching and reminder sets for maximum effectiveness. But do not go overboard either! Beyond a certain point, too many reminder sets will fatigue the muscle, not help it. Two to four sets of static stretches, held for 15 to 20 seconds, can be a good foundation to work with.
How Can You Integrate Recovery Reminders?
The arsenal of recovery can be implemented 24 to 48 hours after you have worked the muscle involved. Reminder sets can be included at the beginning of your regular training (as a warm-up) or at the end (as a cool-down). Stretches can be done both before and after a workout.
Get a Head Start On Recovery
Another strategy enables you to work a muscle again even if the muscle has not yet fully recovered. This partial-recovery approach allows you to increase the frequency of your workouts for a muscle while avoiding overtraining. It is primarily intended for experienced lifters who are suffering from recovery issues. This tactic involves using a single exercise for the muscle in each workout and alternating exercises every workout.
Read more from The Strength Training Anatomy Workout, Volume II by Frederic Delavier and Michael Gundill.
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