Latest / Cameron's Conversations: The last weight loss podcast you'll ever need. / Episode 78: How to focus on a muscle group in your training
Transcript
- Cameron: Welcome to the Cameron's Conversations podcast. And in today's episode, I want to talk about how to work on a specific muscle group and how to bring up a specific muscle group. And what I mean by bring up, if you like, to see more definition. this is actually, I'm brought on by one of my one-to-one clients who's been working with me for the last six weeks. He's absolutely smashing it, making tons of progress in the gym. And we're having a good conversation about. how to get even more. So she really wants to work on her shoulders and biceps. Girl after moan heart, right? she has been absolutely smashing training, making really, really good progress, but it was just something that we kind of wanted to touch on more. like, there anything else I could be doing on that front? So there's a really, really good question. And actually there's a couple of things that you want to consider when it comes to training to get the most out of it. So this is very specific to, if you do have a muscle group where you think, do you know what, I'd really like. I'd like to see more definition in my shoulders or my upper back or do you know what, I'd love to have really like good like sort of definition in my quads or whatever it is, doesn't really matter. But any area of our body this is gonna apply to, it's not specific to a specific muscle group. But this will be a nice way of starting to frame it and to start to understand how we look at training. Now, what I would say is this is that pretty much everyone should train their whole body, right? It makes, and fact probably everyone. should train every muscle in their body as reasonably as they can. We want to have a full body programme. But there is a lot of utility in having periods of focus on certain things. So I've definitely had focuses on at points like my upper back, where I thought to myself, actually I'd like to, I really enjoy my upper back training, but I feel like I could kick on even more. And I think I have four upper back, I'm naturally quite strong, I just enjoy it, right? So let's see what we can achieve if I really hammer in on all my upper back movements, so my things, my chin ups. my lat pull downs, my cable rows, my seated rows, my single arm rows. Not that I was doing all of these to be clear, but I just mean these are the type of movements we're thinking of, right? So let's say, and I'm gonna just do little case study example on me. Let's say I walk in my own door and say, right Cameron, I want to see even more definition in my upper back. Well, the first place I'm gonna start is this. The first thing I'm gonna say is weight loss will always help you see more definition, right? Undoubtedly, when you have less. body fat, you can see more muscle mass. That is one of the simplest ways and I often say this, and particularly to male clients as well who want to more definition, because it's really common thing, like, don't know whether I should gain muscle first or I should lose weight first. And I always say lose weight first because a lot of guys have more muscle than they think they do, but they just need to lose weight to see it, and guys and girls to be clear, I don't just mean guys, I mean that in more broad term. But this is something that's always the case, is being leaner helps you see it. And second advantage of being leaner, when you get leaner, as I'm sure a lot of my clients who are listening will ⁓ experience themselves, is that when you're going through that process, you get leaner, you see more definition come through. You see it come through, and then when you add a little bit of muscle, when you keep getting stronger, it becomes even more obvious because you only have to add a small amount of muscle to see a difference. So that's point one, out of the way, I want to get stuck into the training side of it. So everything else is about training, right? Yes, being a bit leaner helps, cool. But that doesn't help me big about build bigger biceps or a bigger back or whatever it is you want to build, right? If I need to see a bit more definition there, I need to add some muscle to that area. Now, one thing I'll quickly say is sometimes people worry about getting quote unquote bulky. Now, sadly, I've been trying to get bulky since I'm 13. Turns out getting bulky is not that easy and it always makes me smile because it's a wee bit like me jumping out in my Fiesta and worrying I'm gonna become Lewis Hamilton. The reality is, is even for someone like me who's gone through various phases where I've been more or less focused on muscle gain, is it's not that easy. It's very easy to make progress, yes, absolutely, in the sense that it's not that complicated. But what I mean is, is you don't overnight get massively bulky. And people worry about this when they're training two, three times a week, and not on a huge calorie surplus, and they're training with reasonable intensity. There's just no need to worry about getting bulky. For context, I have been a coach for 11 years, and I have not once had a client say to me, I'm getting too bulky. And in that entire 11 year period, I've only had one client say, do you know what, I feel like my legs are defined enough, I actually don't know if I need to build any more muscle there. And we've slightly tweaked her training around that and just almost biased her other areas of her body because she was just like, do you know what, I'm pretty good here, I don't really want to add any more muscle. That's once in 11 years. And I'll be honest, she had ridiculous genetics for it. She just responded to training really, really well, better than. most people you would see, right, by a margin. And that's true. Like some people, you'll notice this, you know, like I have really, really big calves, always have. And ironically, this is a funny little story, an anecdote. I was in the staff room one day when I was a PT in a gym years back. And one of the PT's was like, what is it you do to train your calves? And it was like a stab through the heart because that was the only muscle group that wasn't training at the time and hadn't trained for years and years and years, just genetics. So we do have genetic sort of biases if you like, where you will see certain muscle groups more than others. But what we want to think about when we're trying to build muscle as such is that we don't have to worry about being bulky. That's not a thing. So we park that, right? We're not gonna get bulky overnight. It just will not happen. It's almost like dieting for three days and expecting to see huge difference. Look, if you set in a calorie surplus for the next three, four years and train four or five times a week and train hard, Maybe, maybe, maybe if you have great genetics you might get there, but it's very unlikely. Another quick anecdote on the same subject, so remember someone saying to me once, like, ⁓ I'm a bit worried, like, what if I end up looking like one of those weightlifters in the Olympics? And I was like, I mean this in a really polite way, but that Olympic lifter has been through three Olympic cycles, 12 years, and probably did Olympic weightlifting for three, four, five years before that, at minimum. That's 18 years of lifting during the Olympics as well. was like, the standards of that are unbelievably high. They're probably training six times a week with the nutrition on point with the performance nutritionist all the time. It's like, I wouldn't worry too much about it. I think that's fairly unlikely. Obviously I said it in a nice way, but it was a great question, but it just made me smile because I was like, yeah, that's not a worry. It's a bit like me worrying about turning into Chris Hoy by going on my bike once a week. Yeah, not gonna happen. My quads are never gonna be as big as his. Anyway, to the point on this one. So when we want to build a muscle group, What's the first thing I would look at? Well, I would look at frequency. Really simple. If you want to build a muscle group faster, you're probably gonna benefit from training it a little bit more often. So if you're training it once a week, go to twice. If you're training it twice, you could go to three times. Beyond that, is it better? Probably not. Probably not. You're probably gonna find for most people that at least 90 plus percent of the benefit is gonna come from two to three times a week anyway. If you're training hard and with proper intensity, which we're gonna come on to, that's not gonna be enough anyway, so I wouldn't bother. If I was trying to really work on my biceps, for example, so on bigger arms, or my upper back, as I said, I would use this as example, so we'll stick with that. Upper back, hitting it three times a week would be perfect. And what might be good is because my upper back's a bit of a different kind of muscle group, which we're come onto in a second, I might want to tackle that in a few different ways. That would work. I have three opportunities a week to train it and to do different movements. Cool, that makes a lot of sense. Three times a week would work really well for that. For most people, Going from once to twice is a great place to start. So frequency is the first thing. The second thing is intensity. This is, you train three times a week, great. Now do you train it hard? You must, must, must push yourself. You cannot do a lat pull down, or I couldn't do a lat pull down in this situation and be like, that was all right, and stop. If I do that, I can expect the sum total of bugger all in terms of progress. I am not going to see a visual difference from that. It is not enough, bluntly. especially as you get past the beginner stage because sometimes people get caught out by that. It's like, ⁓ but that was enough at the start. Yeah, cool. When your body was never used to lifting a weight before, it hadn't seen a dumbbell before, when you started lifting some weights, of course you got stronger by almost looking at one. You did a few reps of this, a few reps of that, that was enough. The standard increases as you get farther on in this journey. So you have to also train with bit of intensity. The third thing is getting a complete challenge to your muscle. And I actually just about touched on this about your upper back. So let's say I wanted to work on my upper back. Let's say I'm doing lat pull downs twice a week right now. Well, how could I progress from that, right? I want to build more muscle mass in my upper back or I want to see more definition, okay. Right, I'm doing two lat pull downs a week, that's a good start. So I could train three times a week. That would be one way of increasing. Then I can also train harder another way. But then what I could look at is what does my upper back do? Well, It doesn't just pull things from overhead, like a chin up or a lat pull down, a vertical pulling movement, but also I could do a single arm row, a horizontal pulling motion as well. So maybe I start to do that. So now what I'm doing is on the first session of the week, I maybe do a lat pull down and I do ⁓ a single arm row. On the middle session of the week, I do a seated row, so another horizontal row, and I maybe do a slightly different type of lat pull down, like a single arm lat pull down. Big fan of those as movement. And then in the last session of the week I maybe just do like a lat pull down as standard or maybe I do a single arm row, something of that nature, right? So I'm in essence hitting a vertical pulling motion and a horizontal pulling motion. Now, a bit of context on this, let's say I was doing the same thing for my biceps, that option isn't as available to me. I probably wouldn't do two of the same movements in the same session because it'd be very similar, very, very similar. ⁓ Dumbbell bicep curl to hammer curl is not a massive, massive difference, a little, but not much. So in a bicep movement, I might do something like a dumbbell bicep curl on a Monday, and I might do a hammer curl on a Wednesday, and I might do a bicep curl again on a Friday, sure. Three times a week, great. For an upper back movement, I would be more inclined to pair them together, but we want to make sure we have a complete challenge to the muscle. And the same applies for your abs. We want great abs, great. You're probably doing crunches, sit-ups, hollow body holds, dead bugs, something of that nature. What about a side bend? What about a wood chopper, which is a rotational movement? You can't really do that home for context, you have to kinda do that in gym. But there are different ways, because our abs can also move us from side to side. They work in spinal flexion, so bending your spine as such, rather than standing up straight, they bend your spine. That's what you do in a sit-up or dead bug, a whole body hold. You lift your upper back off the floor, that's part of it, it's part of the job. But they also can fight something. So if something's pulling you to the side, you're twisting against it, it's anti-rotation or rotation. and sounds really fancy, doesn't it? If someone's like, ⁓ what did you do in the gym today? Anti-rotation. It's actually not that complicated at all. You're just fighting against something pulling you to one side. Or you could do a side bend as well because it also has a role in that. So this is where we might, if we were building our abs and someone's just got hollow body holds in, cool, nothing wrong with that. But there might be more to do here. There might be more to give in terms of that context. So that's another thing that can be really, really useful as well. So we've touched on frequency, intensity. getting a complete challenge to the muscle. Those are the big three that I would be worrying about and focusing on because honestly, they make all the difference in the world. And a lot of the time, most people will actually be doing them reasonably frequently anyway, maybe once a week minimum, so that's an easy win. Then the second thing is challenging yourself. And at this point, I want to just touch back on really pushing yourself. You know, you've gotta give it some oomph if you're going to try and see progress. If you haven't increased on your bicep curls in two months because you're kind of bimbling through it, that's what's holding you back. And actually, sure, doing it more often might help, but it might not be the solution. But what will really, really help is just doing it two, three times a week, if you're really keen, three times a week, to nail a muscle group and then push hard. And a final bit of context that often gets asked is, should I add more movements? Well, I've talked about getting a complete challenge about how I'd have a lat pull down and a seated draw. What I wouldn't do, as an example, is this. I wouldn't have a seated row, a single arm row, and let's say a cable row that are all horizontal rows, they're all pretty much the same movement in the same section. Why? Because I'm doing the same movement. I'm targeting the muscle in pretty much, not exactly, but pretty much the same way. So all that tells me is if I can do three sets, sorry, three different movements, three separate exercises for three sets each, do you know what's happening there? I'm not training hard enough, and I'm trying to use It's like a quantity over quality approach. I'll do loads and loads of it, cool. Or you could do those single arm rows and do them with a bit more intensity than your granny trains. If you're training with the intensity of your 90 year old granny, that's your problem, right? So start there because it makes all the difference. So hopefully that was quite like a practical specific kind of bit of guidance and advice on that. Obviously different muscle groups are different in the way we challenge them. but hopefully that helps a little bit in overall context and understanding of what training focal points can be. There's different levers we can pull on. If someone's already doing three times a week, well, frequency's no longer useful, park that. If they're already pushing themselves to the absolute max, which most of us frankly aren't, including myself at times, I catch myself on video and I'm like, you could be doing more there. These things are really important, but then also we want to be thinking about these other things that complete challenges. So hopefully that was helpful and if your training is in a spot where you'd like it to be a ⁓ bit more progress from it, you'd like to see a little bit more visual change, you may be also struggling with the weight loss side of things and your nutrition isn't where you want it to be, then that's what one-to-one coaching is for. We go in depth on all things nutrition, all things training, making sure that you are really, really clear in terms of the direction you need to go in and making sure you're held accountable to getting there rather than faffing away weeks into months. If you feel like you need a bit of a hand, you will see in the show notes, the link to my WhatsApp is there, so you can click on that, pop me a message as well. No jokes about me needing SPF 75 with the sun now finally breaking through over the last couple weeks. But otherwise, have a great week. If you need to kind of jump into show notes for that, there's a link there. But otherwise, speak to you soon.