Lagging Muscle Groups and Impacts

[Chicagotarsier]

Biceps are the bane to my existence. I never could get them to grow for crap and working them just made them cramp bad..minimal mass gains.

Enter TrT

Reading posts about lagging groups and how dumb it is and detrimental I decided to give max focus to my biceps. I only do three workouts on them currently because they are still "not that strong" Hammers, Concentration Curls, Long Bar Curls. TrT is really helping me here and each week I go up 5 pounds on the weights I use for the exercises...and a very cool thing happens as a side effect.

My plateaued bench raises 10 pounds for every 5 pounds I add to the curl weights. This is for 4 weeks in a row now. Triceps, shoulders, back all the same workout weights over this time frame.

I attribute it to ramping up the lagging muscle group.

Anyone else see results in non-muscle group exercises by strengthening a lagging muscle?

[RangerDanger830]

Absolutely. I never knew how important some muscles were to exercises that you would think wouldn't use them at all. This realization happened each time I injured a muscle or after I had surgery. That body part would be out of commission and I would struggle to do things I thought wouldn't involve that part at all.

As far as the lagging muscles go, I know how you feel. I have been there. I was in the Army and at the time I ran every day in my unit and when I wasn't running I was in AFG climbing mountains. So I never worked out legs much because I thought that was adequate, it wasn't.

I tell guys that are early on in their training, maybe 3 years or less, just to work everything out evenly from that point on and when you get much bigger and stronger the difference will be negligible. However, if the lagging muscle group is seriously deficient I tell them to focus on it but to be wary of over-focusing. Sometimes it is difficult for us to see these things coming after looking at ourselves in the mirror daily. I would recommend having a buddy check your proportions out from time to time for good measure.

I wouldn't attribute most of your bench gains from the biceps, probably your lack of Test helped those go up some assuming you went on TRT necessarily, and I am. I do not know anything about you but I will say that the majority of the time guys do not see bicep growth it is due to poor form. It is easy to think you are getting the full range of motion from those curls but by swinging your upper arms you are just creating the illusion. Keep an eye on that even if you think you are good, never hurts to check right?