My previous post went over the importance of gauging your progress not necessarily by the weight on your scale, but by how proportional your measurements are.
I’ve got a few weaknesses based on my measurements. My biggest? My arms.
This is rare in most guys, but is a by-product of reading in my early training days that your arms will get enough stimulus from back and chest work. As a result, I ditched direct arm work. My back and chest grew, but my arms never did. (As you can see, I very strongly disagree that your arms will get worked hard enough through back and chest training alone. And if your arms are getting a hard workout from this kind of training, you’re likely not targeting the chest/back combo very well and need to work on your form.)
In an effort to build a more proportional body, for the past four weeks I have been focusing specifically on my arms.
When you specialize on a muscle group, you will want to focus on that one group — and hard — for a period of about four weeks. Assuming you do this right, your body will want to give up about partway through the fourth week, and you’ll likely even see a drop in the amount of weight you can lift. This is completely normal, and will result in a big “rebound” effect when you let that muscle group rest for a week after.
For my arms, I’m working them hard three days a week — Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday. My other body parts get worked out once a week — again, until failure, but only once a week.
My arms are not given much time to rest and recuperate. The result of this is that, after the four weeks are up, I’ll rest them for one week and they’ll experience the majority of their growth then.
This isn’t to say they aren’t growing right now. I’m eating a 4000+ calorie diet — based on a high-fat, high-protein, low-carb protocol, but not exactly the Anabolic Diet — and I’ve put on a good amount of size already. But I do expect to grow a lot more once I give my arms a week to rest.
But if you want to bring up a lagging body part, I recommend focusing on that one body part for four weeks at a time until you have it where you want it. Take some rest, re-measure yourself to see what needs work next, and continue the cycle.
