How To Improve Lagging Muscles

A lagging muscle is a muscle that stops growing or getting stronger.

When faced with the situation of a muscle not being as developed as others, people intuitively think that more is better. As such, they’ll often work on a lagging muscle with great regularity. For example, they’ll do curls EVERY DAY in order to bring their arms up. Curling EVERY DAY seems to make sense to get stronger and build bigger biceps, no? But that approach is wrong.

Why?

Because muscles grow outside of the gym, not inside it, by the body repairing the damaged muscle tissue to make it bigger and stronger to better withstand stress the next time you expose it to stressful stimuli, such as weights. That being so, when do you allow for the muscle to recover if you’re beating it into the ground on a daily basis?⁣
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Rather than the all-out approach, do this instead…⁣

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What you should do to bring up a lagging muscle is to work on it regularly. However, instead of training the muscle EVERY DAY, what you should do is leave enough space between workouts for it to recover. So, returning to the biceps example, that means you should train your arms on Monday and Thursday, or something akin to that.

Yup, increase the frequency but leave enough space for rest and recovery!

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Increasing the training volume of a lagging muscle is a good way to improve it. However, the key is to do so in a way that you’re not overtraining. The manner to go about that was outlined above.

Aside from workload, other things that can be altered to prompt a change in the size and strength of a lagging muscle are the selection or order of exercises, the technique they’re performed with, and the level of intensity that you work out at. An adjustment to one or all of those things can be enough to encourage a training response from a muscle that isn’t as responsive as others.

In illustration of the first item that can be addressed, let’s return to the biceps example. If one arm is significantly smaller or weaker than the other, then you may want to perform more unilateral exercises that work the limbs separately rather than continuing to perform bilateral exercises that allow for one side of the body to take over during the lift and do the majority of the work. Muscle imbalances in the size and strength between opposite sides of the body are common so it’s nothing to be overly concerned with but when that disparity is significant, unilateral exercises are an ideal corrective measure. As for muscles that aren’t a matter of side dominance, such as an upper chest that’s lagging behind the development of the middle and lower chest, for example, it’d be best to pick exercises that target the specific area. So for the upper chest, the incline dumbbell or barbell bench press would be perfect choices. Here, not only is choosing the appropriate exercise important for fixing a lagging muscle but so too is placing the exercise in the correct spot of your workout. So because your upper chest is the area that you need to develop the most, the incline bench press should be the very first exercise that you hit on chest day. In other words, prioritize the lagging muscle and train it with the correct exercise when you’re at your freshest and able to put all your energy and focus into it.

Concerning technique and intensity, it’s simple. You can perform the right exercise for a muscle but it’s not going to grow or become stronger if the muscle isn’t properly activated during the movement. The number of solutions here are many, which include slowing the reps down and eliminating the use of momentum, pausing to squeeze the muscle, and taking the muscle through its entire range of motion. And if the imbalance has to do with side dominance, then shifting more of your weight to your less dominant side when performing bilateral work may also be a technique correction. The same regarding technique applies for intensity. You can perform the right exercise for a muscle but it’s not going to grow or become stronger if you don’t give it a reason to make an adaptation. So while the rest of your body might be able to get away with you not working exceptionally hard, your lagging muscle may need you to train it at a higher intensity that presents a challenge to it, which could possibly call for upping the weight, cutting down rest periods, or lifting past comfort by implementing drop sets or practicing the rest-pause method, for example.¹

Some muscles grow like weeds while some others don’t. What it all boils down to is genetics. Your ability to develop muscle in certain places is dictated by your genetic predisposition to respond to training stimuli. That’s not something that’s within your control.² What is in your control, however, is your training.

Proper programming and execution may not necessarily help you overcome your genetic potential but they’ll certainly get you closer to maximizing it. So do you have a lagging muscle that you’re insecure about and want people to stop making fun of you for because it’s so ridiculously small compared to everything else?

Well, outlined for you were several things you can do to correct the situation.

Best of luck!

Glossary: arms, barbell, bench press, biceps, chest, dumbbell, exercise, frequency, genetics, gym, intensity, lifting form, Monday, motivation, muscle, program, reps, spot, training partner, workout, work out

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Monster Longe

Monster Longe is a personal trainer in San Diego. He has been lifting weights for +25 years and training clients in the gym and online for about half of that time. When not working with clients or making content that's easy to read, understand, and apply to everyday life, he enjoys long walks and leaving buildings crushed and entire city blocks decimated in his wake.

How To Improve Lagging Muscles

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