Got a muscle group or two that’s lagging behind the others?
Got a muscle group or two that’s lagging behind the others? Try this:
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Pick the one or two muscle groups that you want to focus on growing. These are your lagging groups; the rest will be your maintenance groups. Train the lagging muscles Monday, Wednesday, Friday. REST Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. Train your maintenance groups on Sunday. That’s right - your entire week will be spent training ONLY the lagging body parts, with complete rest days after these sessions to maximise recovery and growth. The rest of your body will be trained on one day in the week because you simply don’t need that much volume to MAINTAIN muscle over a short time frame. If you did this for 6 months straight you might start losing muscle in your strong areas, but if we stick to this plan for 4-6 weeks you won’t lose anything that you’ve already developed. You’ll definitely give your body the chance to grow the muscles which have been falling behind though.
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You actually need a lot less volume then you think to maintain your strong areas. You don’t need a heap of volume if your goal is just to maintain the muscle (just do 4-6 sets per muscle group, take to failure or at least close) plus if they’re your strong muscles you probably have a genetic predisposition to keeping that muscle anyway. Training it once per week is fine, and if you feel like you can’t train your maintenance muscle groups all in one day just split it up so you train the maintenance muscle groups once PER FORTNIGHT. Say Arms and Delts were lagging, you could hit Chest / Back on Sunday Week 1 and Legs on Sunday Week 2. Relax, you won’t lose any muscle reducing your training frequency like this if we just do it for a limited time.
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Hit your lagging group hard and heavy, make use of intra-workout nutrition like we’ve mentioned, keep your calories high enough to grow, make sure those rest days are inserted because you WILL cut into your target muscle’s recovery ability if you go training again the day after, and make sure you sleep sleep sleep! If anything’s going to make a lagging muscle grow, its a focussed training block like this.
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Msg us anytime for help with your training ❤️
Strength Lab - Personal Training, Body Transformation Coaching and Competition Preparation
Personal Training Hawthorn, Melbourne