Training Problem Areas

Almost everybody, no matter how long and hard they’ve trained have that one area of their body they would like to improve on. Sometimes it’s due to neglect or lack of effort training this specific area, other times it’s just genetics. For me personally, and I’m sure a good percentage of everyone else, my problem area has always been my legs, particularly my calves. The first few years I spent in the gym I was totally focused on just my upper body. I figured why waste time training my legs when I can just devote that extra time to perfecting my six pack and adding extra size and definition to the rest of my upper body, when that’s all I really cared about anyway. This attitude along with my naturally lean frame turned my legs into a “problem area” for me once I got more and more into fitness and started considering competing and fitness modeling. With that being said, that’s why today’s topic is discussing ways to improve some of the most common “problem areas” that most people have.

Chest

One common problem I encounter regularly and actually somewhat suffered from myself (a long time ago, of course) is having big arms in proportion to a smaller chest. One way to solve this problem is starting your chest workout with isolating exercises like the reverse pec-deck flye using a heavy weight for as many reps as you can in order to pre-exhaust your chest muscles. This makes the chest muscles feel like they are doing more work when you move on to your presses. Another way to add overall size to your chest that many people have started to neglect is the standard bar-bell press. While for shaping, defining and brining out your chest dumbbells are more effective.

 
Quads and Hamstrings

Legs are probably the most common problem area for most people because it’s the area most often neglected in one’s training split. Legs can also be the most difficult area to add size to. Just like with chest a very effective way to add size to your quads and hamstrings is by pre-exhausting the muscles. (see a reoccurring theme yet?) For example, start with all of the simple, isolating exercises first such as leg extensions and hamstring curls. After completing some dead lifts, lunges, leg presses, etc. finally work on squats at the very end instead of in the beginning like most people do. Again the pre-exhausting will make your quads and hamstrings feel like they are doing a lot more work when doing the squats, thus helping them grow at a more rapid pace!

 
Calves

Calves are one of the more difficult muscles to get to react to your training of them because they are already accustomed to taking a lot of abuse from just you walking on them and using them every day. That is why it’s really important to focus on overloading and shocking them. To get results from your calve training you need to select three different exercises (changing them up of course) and load up with a good amount of weight and crank out as many reps as you can possibly do. Also don’t be shy to superset or even tri-set the exercises.

 
 
Arms

A common site I see at the gym is someone that has big arms and looks good when they have a t-shirt on but then when wearing a sleeveless shirt they just have bulky smooth looking arms with little definition. This is particularly seen in those who are all “roided up” because they are holding so much water. Anyway, if arms are your problem area regardless of the reason, you need to be sure you are targeting your arms at all different angles. When training biceps you need to be sure to change up your grip (wide grip, regular grip and narrow grip) while performing your bicep exercises. You also need to change up your degree of motion, doing curls only coming up half way and others starting the motion from the half way up point. As for triceps it’s all about form, reps and not trying to use too much weight. When it comes to achieving razor sharp tris you need to be willing to sacrifice the amount of weight for picture perfect form and higher repetitions. You also need to perform a good amount of exercises (between 4 or 5).

 
Abdominals

Almost everyone wants a six pack of abs yet most people, even the gym regulars don’t have one. Usually this is due to lack of diet, cardio or repetitions during an abdominal training session. You need to incorporate all three of these elements into your ab-training or unless you are just genetically gifted will fail to achieve a six pack. One mistake many people make is training their abs for too short of a period (doing maybe 3 sets of decline crunches and calling it a day). You need to train the abdominals similar to every other muscle doing 3-4 different exercises each session and 3-4 sets for each exercise. The only difference is doing higher repetitions during each set. Then there’s the other most common problem I see, the guy who does several different ab-exercises and sets every day and doesn’t understand why he still cant see his abs. Nine times out of ten this guy isn’t working cardio into his regiment and/or doesn’t diet properly or better yet doesn’t at all. The best way to eliminate excess fat around the waist is through cardio and if you really want to eliminate the extra layer of fat do cardio first thing in the morning on an empty stomach. You can have the strongest abs in the world from doing hundreds of crunches a day but if there’s a layer of fat over them, you still won’t be able to see them!
 

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