Select Page

Bodybuilding is the pursuit of a balanced, well rounded and aesthetic physique and focusing on our strong points whilst neglecting our weak points is probably the worst thing to do. Learn to love training your weak points during your workouts and work on them until they become your strong points!

After a year or two of consistently training your muscle groups equally, you should start to notice those areas which don’t respond quite as well as others. Of course you may have been blessed with perfect genetics, in which case this article won’t apply to you at all!

For myself, my weak areas have always been arms and calves. My larger muscle groups seem to start growing at the mere sight of a set of weights but my problem areas require additional attention to bring them up to speed! There are a number of ways you can tailor your own workout program to ensure you are hitting your own personal weak points.

[separator style_type=’single’ top_margin=’15’ bottom_margin=’30’ sep_color=’#ededed’ icon=” width=” class=” id=”]

1. Train Your Weak Points First

If you are using a training split which involves training more than one muscle group at once, for example chest and triceps, start your workout by training your weaker muscle group first. Let’s say your triceps are the weaker muscle group, start by training triceps before performing your chest exercises. This will pre-exhaust your triceps and force them to work harder than your chest which should help them to improve!

[separator style_type=’single’ top_margin=’15’ bottom_margin=’30’ sep_color=’#ededed’ icon=” width=” class=” id=”]

2. Use Specific Movements

To build the ultimate aesthetic physique, not only must each muscle be in proportion but they should also be well developed. Different exercises will hit different parts of the muscle and you can use specific exercises to hit the weakest areas of a particular muscle group. For example, tricep rope pulldowns and overhead triceps extensions both hit the triceps but rope pulldowns will put more focus on the lateral head and overhead extensions will put more focus on the long head. Let’s say your lateral head is better developed than your long head, you could swap rope pulldowns for overhead extensions to help bring up your weak areas. This is just an example and this principle can be applied to any muscle group.

[separator style_type=’single’ top_margin=’15’ bottom_margin=’30’ sep_color=’#ededed’ icon=” width=” class=” id=”]

3. Increase Frequency for Weak Points

It might pay off to increase the frequency with which you train your weaker areas. For example if you have a great set of well developed shoulders but your calves are lagging, it would not make sense to train shoulders 3 times per week and calves once every two weeks. Increase the number of times that you train your weaker areas per week but ensure your strong areas don’t get neglected entirely. 2-3 times per week is the maximum frequency I would recommend for a particular body part and make sure everything else gets trained at least once per week!

[separator style_type=’single’ top_margin=’15’ bottom_margin=’30’ sep_color=’#ededed’ icon=” width=” class=” id=”]

4. Experiment with Different Rep Ranges

There is no ideal rep range which will work for every body part for every individual. The only way to find out what works for you is through experimentation. If you find that you hit a plateau with the conventional 6-12 reps switch is up and try the extremes of high and low rep training. I would recommend doing 5 sets of 5 reps if you go for the low rep route or try something like 3 sets of 30-50 reps. There are tons of different ways you can mix things up, try doing pyramid sets, german volume training, supersets or dropsets.