[quote]Droogan Leader wrote:
Coach,
Lower body maintenance and upper body growth. I recently finished dropping to my desired weight not too long ago, but was a little displeased with the results. I had built some decent muscle (I emphasized too much on pwer cleans, deadlifts and squats) and maintained much of my strength in my legs, but my upper body looks 3rd world (leaving me unbalanced). To make it worst, I have a wide-waist even when very lean, which makes me look even more blocky.
I want to gain muscle again, but this time really focusing on my upper body (namely arms, traps, wide lats and wide shoulders) with atleast maintaining my lower body strength. This way when I drop back down again, I will look a lot more balanced.
What would you briefly recommend as far as training goes? Extremely heavy low rep, low set leg movements on leg day?
I’m considering a 4 day split (legs one day, shoulders/back/chest on the other three), but what would you advise?
Thanks for the time![/quote]
I think that specializing is the best way to stimulate long-term growth at the fastest possible rate.
However I believe that specializing on 3 major muscle group at once is a recipe for disaster.
Here’s why a spec approach is superior:
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You are focusing all your adaptation energy towards making the one or two target muscle groups grow.
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The more you can stimulate a muscle without exceeding your capacity to recover, the more growth youâ??ll stimulate in that muscle.
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The more often you train a muscle, the better you become at recruiting the fast twitch/high-threshold muscle fibers within that muscle (neural efficiency). The more you can recruit those high growth potential fibers, the more size youâ??ll gain.
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Increasing the amount of work for the target muscle groups while keeping the same amount of weekly work (by reducing work for other body parts) will prevent CNS fatigue and an hormonal crash toward catabolism.
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You need much less stimulation to maintain muscle mass than to increase it. So even if you train a muscle for maintenance you will not lose any size (you might even gain some).
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Constantly hitting a muscle hard will eventually make that muscle less and less responsive to any training stimulus. At first you can circumvent the problem by changing exercises and training methods. But eventually your muscles become so adapted to handling physical work that their response to any form of training becomes insignificant. This is called a loss of trainability.
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The way to restore trainability is to â??detrainâ?? the non-responsive muscle. You can do this either by stopping training (in which case youâ??ll lose size and strength) or by dramatically reducing training stress for that muscle group (in which case you can maintain size and strength).
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So while you may fear losing some size by maintaining muscle groups, you are actually making them more responsive to training which means that in the long run youâ??ll be able to make them much larger than had you continued to train them maximally year round.
Pay special attention to points 2. 6. and 7.
Basically you want to bring up your body, so you decide to go with a spec approach. This is fine.
Where you go wrong is that you decide to specialize on the WHOLE upper body at the same time. Even if you try to avoid it, it is very likely thar you will end up exceeding your capacity to recover while doing so.
But this isn’t even the biggest problem.
By attempting to bring up the whole upper body at once you will kill your trainability real fast. In other words, while growth might be okay for 2-3 weeks. More than that an no upper body muscle will respond to training even if you are changing your training stimulus. You’ll end up plateauing way before your solved your problem.
A smarter approach would be to specialize on one major muscle group and its synergist for 3-4 weeks, then moving on to a different section:
I suggest:
Weeks 1-3: Shoulders and traps
Weeks 4-6: Back and biceps
Weeks 7-9: Chest and triceps
Weeks 10-11: regular trainining
Start a second cycle
The spec muscle groups get 3 workouts a week while the rest of the body is worked for maintenance over 1 or 2 other workouts.