mihou
Rang: Administrateur
Nombre de messages : 8092
Localisation : Washington D.C.
Date d'inscription : 28/05/2005
 | | Shaping a Muscle by Chad Waterbury | |
Shaping
a Muscle
by Chad Waterbury
You can't change the shape of a muscle.
It will grow, shrink or stay the same. You could do curls with your
elbows tucked to your sides and a wide hand position until the cows
come home and it won't do jack shit for the inner head of your biceps.
The reason? Because you can't fire the inner head without the outer
head. Furthermore, show me one bodybuilder who got visible results
with such unorthodox curls. In other words, targeting certain areas
of your biceps looks great on paper, but it never pans out in the
real world.
I
do get a kick out of hearing the proponents of the curling variations
with different arm and hand positions, though. Usually it goes
something like this, "Most people perform curls with poor form (flared elbows)
and their inner head gets neglected."
Therefore they recommend targeting that lagging inner head by curling
with your elbows in and hands wide.
Here's an idea: why don't you just start curling with better form?
Can you reshape a muscle? No. Can you train key muscles in a group
to grow? No, unless it's the quadriceps. Since the quads are such
a massive muscle group with four primary heads, and since each head
is favored at certain knee angles, a little tweaking is possible.
For example, hack squats will build up your lateral thigh (vastus
lateralis) because the movement overloads the vastus lateralis at
knee angles greater than 90 degrees. The full, ass-to-grass front
squat will build up your medial thigh (vastus medialis) because it
overloads the vastus medialis at knee angles less than 90 degrees.
But this is limited to the quadriceps. Indeed, it's the only muscle
group that has the capacity to be fine-tuned.
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