How to Bring Up That One Stubborn Body Part You Can't Grow
In a Nutshell
To grow stubborn lagging muscles, prioritize **three changes in sequence**: (1) **increase volume** to 25-35+ hard working sets per muscle per week (far beyond typical 5-15 sets), autoregulating by adding sets until recovery falters then deloading; (2) **boost frequency** to 2-4 sessions/week (keeping sessions under 10 sets for quality); (3) **train them early** in workouts for peak energy, mind-muscle connection, and effort. Specialize on 2-3 muscles at a time for 2-3 mesocycles (4-6 weeks each with deloads), using maintenance volume (~6 sets/week) for others; vary exercises/reps, progress loads, and incorporate fun techniques like drop sets via the RP app. Lagging muscles recover faster and need more stimulus than strong ones—floor the gas on volume first before tweaking anything else.
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You're not going to grow your best in most cases, especially with lagging muscle groups, doing between five and 15 sets per week. There's probably a good chance that just more volume will fix it. And if you slam the accelerator and do 30ish sets per muscle per week, you're going to be doing some growing. You get real distinct differences in growth depending on where you put your lagging muscle groups. If your muscles can still recover, they will absolutely grow more.
Hey folks, Dr. Mike here for RP Strength. You're struggling to grow certain muscles, especially in certain muscle groups that you want to grow the most, like arms or delts or legs or whatever is holding your physique back. Globally, you can eat more protein, put that protein into four to five evenly spaced, nutritious meals throughout the day, select better exercises that fit your body better or are more stimulative of growth, enhance your technique, push each set harder, get more sleep. All of these help you grow.
But of all the changes in a program, there are three changes that are really a big unlock. If you make these three changes, you can almost certainly see progress in your lagging muscle groups (95% plus chance). They come in a sequence: first the most powerful (volume), second most powerful (frequency), third (priority).
Volume is the amount of training that you do. Analogy: amount of orange juice poured into a glass, just the amount. Technically, volume is weight per rep multiplied by reps per set multiplied by all sets for that muscle in every exercise, and ultra-technically work is force times distance. But as long as each set is within three or four reps shy of failure and load is between 5 rep max and 30 rep max, the easiest indicator is number of working sets per muscle per week.
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