Written by Team MD
20 June 2019

19laggingmuscles

How To Bring Up Lagging Muscles

Solutions from Dennis Wolf, Victor Martinez & Juan Morel

 

 

Dennis Wolf: BACK AND HAMS

 Everybody knows the difficulties I’ve had with calves. But my back and my hamstrings were two areas that weren’t as impressive as the rest of my physique, and people pointed that out for years. I knew I needed to improve them both or else winning a big contest like the Arnold Classic or the Mr. Olympia would be impossible. For me it was a matter of adding more exercises for both, but more so just learning how to feel the muscle much better while I am training it. That’s something that was not possible in my early years of training. The better I was able to feel my back and my hamstrings contracting and stretching during a set, the better both of those body parts became. This is why just lifting the weight is not enough, unless you have some body part that just responds no matter what you do. You really need to learn how to squeeze the muscle and feel every little fiber working if you want to bring up an area that’s more stubborn.

 

Victor Martinez: CALVES

I was lucky that most of my body parts responded pretty well and at about the same rate, but my calves definitely didn’t get the memo! When you don’t have great genetics for calves, it’s frustrating because you do see guys out there with awesome calves who don’t even train theirs. Probably even worse was that I used to watch guys with good calves when they trained them, not realizing that if you have decent calf genetics, you can get away with some pretty sloppy form and still have big calves. They would do those short little bouncy reps on the standing calf raise and the seated calf machine, and they still had 20-inch diamonds. I copied what they did, and mine weren’t even good enough to be cubic zirconia.

 I also thought that working legs more often would make them grow, so I trained them every other day. The first thing I fixed was my form. I started doing my reps slower, with a full range of motion and pausing for a two-second hold at the top of every rep. I made sure I lowered the weight slowly and got a full stretch, too. I started to notice my calves were looking a little better. Then I gave them an extra rest day and only trained them every third day, which usually averages out to twice a week. Low reps did nothing for me, so I started doing no less than 20 and often as many as 50, until the burn was so bad I couldn’t stand it. But it did pay off. My calves aren’t ever going to be the best around, but they are a lot better than they were in my early years as a pro.

 

Juan Morel: QUADS

 My legs, as everyone knows, are the area I have been working hardest on to catch up to everything else. The reason is that in my early years of bodybuilding, I didn’t really know much about rep ranges and all that. I trained my legs like a powerlifter, getting stronger and stronger but always doing pretty low reps. It worked for my upper body, but my legs didn’t respond the same. Luckily, it’s not an issue of genetics or an injury— I just need time to get my legs to match my upper body. If you’ve seen photos of me from the last few years, you can see they are catching up more and more.

Lately, I’ve been doing higher reps for legs, and a lot of supersets. The goal is to get a lot of blood pumping and feel a crazy burn. Usually I have trouble walking at the end of the workout! For squats, I stay with around 10-15 reps on my heavy leg day, then 20 reps on the lighter day. With machines it’s always 15-20 reps. Since I do a lot of supersets, a set usually winds up being around 40 reps total. Some of the supersets I like are squats with hack squats, leg press with hack squats or even two different types of leg presses, back to back. I train at Bev’s, and they have at least a dozen different leg presses to choose from. Sometimes I will do leg presses on the Cybex machine with my feet narrow, then go right to the Nebula one next to it and use a wider stance to hit the adductors, hams and glutes more. My legs get sore the next day, every time. I’m enjoying a nice long off-season now, so they are definitely growing.

 

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