More Back/Shoulder Specialization Results
A few months back I posted the before-and-after pictures of a client of mine who went through a back and shoulders specialization program. You can take a look at those results here. Suffice it to say, the results were obviously impressive … to the point that on one forum, another competitor called them dishonest, suggesting trick photography, or photoshop, etc. I guess we should take that as a compliment since it suggests the results were just that good.
Here’s another example of a client of mine who underwent a similar programming set up – that is, a dedicated period of time where we specifically specialized on back and shoulders, while putting the rest of the body on maintenance. What this generally means is that we up the training volume AND frequency of the specialized body parts while decreasing both on the rest of the body; since everything else we’re just trying to maintain.
Of course this was also done in an environment that supported muscle growth – calories were high and definitely OVER maintenance. This tends to be where many go wrong – they’re training hard, but simply not eating enough to support the growth AND maintenance of new muscle, and hence, invariably don’t ever make much in the way of developmental gains. Trying to make developmental improvements when you’re dieting and not eating much … doesn’t usually prove all that successful.
In these pictures, you can see the very obvious upper body improvements here – namely in the back and shoulders. To reiterate what I posted in the previous example, in a program like this we practically overtrain the targeted muscles for around 6 weeks (we were training back and shoulders three times per week with varying loading parameters and intensity techniques) and then we back right off them with little to virtually no direct training of them for another couple of weeks to allow for any supercompensation during the recovery period when the ‘fatigue’ state passes.
See for yourself. Oh, and no drugs. Stayed pretty lean too.
