As you know, I love to experiment. And the idea of trying to bring up lagging body parts with specialized high frequency training was something I found extremely intriguing. But, as I tweeted on Saturday night:
“Final verdict on the 4 weeks of arms and then 4 weeks of forearms… Big time failure. Blog post Monday to explain.”
The quick and dirty is that I’ve proven to myself in 3 separate tests that specific muscle growth is completely possible, and that training a muscle group 3 to 4 times a week doesn’t cause over-training if you are prepared for it.
During the first month where I trained only my back muscles 3 to 4 times per week I increased the muscle mass of my back by over 4 pounds (As per DEXA). While this was an excellent result (in my opinion) it didn’t transfer in my pictures. Basically, 4 pounds across my entire back isn’t very noticeable.
So I followed this experiment with a 6 week workout program only training arms (biceps and triceps). There was really nothing wrong with my arms I just thought they would be much easier to measure growth via circumference versus a large area like the back.
After 6 weeks the results were similar, and this time a bit more noticeable. I gained over a half inch on both arms…pushing me up to 16.5 inches (Flexed).
Now, this isn’t the biggest they’ve ever been… They were actually 17 inches when I used to weigh almost 216 pounds, but there was a nice layer of fat included in that measurement ;). Considering I’m hovering between 10-12% body fat and approx 177 pounds I’m pretty damn happy getting my arms up to 16.5 inches, and the increase in size was noticeable.
So now I had DEXA evidence that high frequency training could increase the lean body mass of a muscle group, and I have evidence that it could also increase the size of a muscle group as measured by circumference.
I followed these two experiments up with 1 month of only training the muscle groups I considered weak or underdeveloped, namely my calves and forearms.
By the end of this experiment (technically this past Friday) I made some decent progress on my forearms… calves only increased slightly, but it was consistent.
The change in forearms was what I got excited about.. right forearm was up over a half inch, whereas my left forearms was up by almost 3/4 of an inch.
As a person with… shall we say slightly underdeveloped forearms, this is huge.
Now for the bad news.
Neglecting most major muscle for the better part of 3 months is NOT a good idea.
I thought it was just in my head, but the measuring tape doesn’t lie… chest down a half inch on three different days. Shoulders seemed to hold on, but I was sneaking in some extra work on them.
Thigh was down a half inch in the two different spots I measure (6 inches up from the knee cap and 10 inches up from the knee cap)
And sadly, waist was up almost a full inch. Not sure why this happened. It could be that doing an hour of wrist curls is about the metabolic equivalent of sleeping, but most likely it’s just a coincidence that may be related to the fact it’s BBQ season in Canada.
So lessons learned for me:
A) Lagging muscle groups can be brought up with specialized training
B) Ignoring entire muscle groups for 8-12 weeks is never a good idea
So here is my recommendation – If you have a lagging muscle group, you can absolutely bring it up in 4-6 weeks of specialization. I’ve found that training ONLY the muscle group in question, 3 to 5 times a week for 4 to 6 weeks to be an effective way to increase the size of those muscles. However, once those 4-6 weeks are done, I recommend going back to whole body training for around 8-12 weeks before any form of specialized training again.
As for me, it’s time to start up another round of Anabolic Again. I’ve been thinking about some serious tweaks to that protocol, so now it’s time to test it out!
BP
PS – I’ve decided to turn comments off on my blog, since I like talking on Twitter and Facebook better than I do commenting back and forth on blog posts. So feel free to click the Twitter or Facebook links below if you have any questions or comments.
