IT’S ALL IN THE DETAILS BY BILL DOBBINS Train your supporting, aka smaller, muscles just as hard as the big ones for a well-rounded, fully developed physique. In bodybuilding, there are such things as small muscles, but there are no unimportant muscles. In fact, overlooking smaller muscles in your training programme can lead to serious problems later on, whether you’re training for health and fitness, to improve sports performance, for rehabilitation or to become a serious physique competitor. The types of problems that can occur fall roughly into three categories: structural, functional and visual. STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS When it comes to skeletal muscle, there is a certain optimum “balance of power” between one muscle and another and among various muscle groups. For example, the two-headed biceps brachii muscle is not designed to be as strong as the three-headed triceps brachii that opposes it. Therefore, if the biceps become too strong relative to the triceps, an imbalance of structural forces is created. This is also true if the biceps are underdeveloped and become overpowered by the triceps. When an imbalance like this occurs, the risk of injury is greatly increased. A biceps/triceps imbalance, for example, can affect the muscles of the upper arm themselves, as well as adjacent areas such as the elbow joint and the entire shoulder structure. A common example of this kind of imbalance involves the relative strength of the front and rear deltoid heads. The anterior (front) deltoid is involved in many different weight training movements, including chest and shoulder presses and upright rows. The posterior (rear) head comes into play to some extent in behind-the-neck presses and various rowing movements, but it generally gets much less indirect exercise than the front head. As a result, the front head frequently becomes overdeveloped relative to the rear and tends to overpower it, which can pull the highly mobile shoulder joint forward and out of alignment, often resulting in subsequent problems of the involved muscles, tendons and ligaments. One example of muscle imbalance that occurs fairly often among track athletes involves the overdevelopment of the quadriceps relative to the hamstrings. This is one major cause of hamstring pulls among sprinters, long jumpers, high jumpers and other track athletes whose events involve an explosive effort of the legs. FUNCTIONAL PROBLEMS In addition to causing stresses, strains, pains and injuries of varying degrees of seriousness, unbalanced development of various muscles and muscle groups can result in impaired levels of physical performance. This can manifest itself in a number of ways. You can lose strength, flexibility, speed or endurance. Your agility and overall coordination can suffer. Problems like this often happen to athletes in sports that involve very specific physical demands, which tend to overdevelop certain muscles relative to the others, and who don’t do any or enough of other additional training designed to stimulate muscles not specifically used in their sport (which is why more and more athletes nowadays do some form of “cross-training”, including working with weights). VISUAL PROBLEMS Bodybuilders are just as affected by structural and functional problems resulting from imbalanced muscle development as any other athlete. After all, no bodybuilder can expect to make progress if he or she is injured, and anything that diminishes strength or flexibility is also sure to be a hindrance to muscular development. But bodybuilders also have to be concerned with how the muscles look. They need to strive for complete visual development in addition to that of structure and functionality. For example, in a pose like the back double biceps, in addition to back width and thickness, judges also look for such things as separation between biceps and triceps; complete deltoid development as seen from the rear; middle and inner back development as well as the lats and rhomboids; the depth and thickness of the spinal erectors of the lower back. All of these considerations and more are scrutinised in bodybuilding. Many bodybuilders have fallen short of the success to which they aspired because of failure to create sufficient detail in all areas of the body. But the way to overcome this roadblock, as well as to optimise structural balance and muscle performance, is by adequate attention to small muscle training during workouts. SMALL MUSCLE TRAINING When anyone first takes up bodybuilding, whether for physique competition or not, the name of the game is to build as much muscle as possible in as short a time as you can. And that usually involves working the big muscles of the body using the basic exercises in order to create a good, strong, fundamental structure. Unfortunately, exercises like heavy presses, rows and squats don’t do enough by themselves to give you adequate small muscle development. Small muscle training involves a number of other exercises and techniques. However, the two types of training are not mutually exclusive. You don’t have to wait until you’re able to do a 300-pound bench press before beginning to pay attention to working the upper and lower, inner and outer areas of the pecs, or creating separation between the pecs and the front delts. In a good training programme, the proportion and amount of one kind of training relative to another to create optimum balance will vary quite a bit from one individual to another. Small muscle training, in general, involves specific kinds of exercises as well as a variety of particular types of training techniques. For example: ISOLATION EXERCISES Most small muscle-specific exercises involve types of movements that allow you to isolate and focus on specific muscles or muscle groups. There are two general types of weight training movements: (a) multijoint movements, in which two or more joints are involved in moving the weight (such as the shoulder and elbow in a bench or shoulder press); and (b) single-joint movements (such as a curl, in which only the elbow is involved). One-joint movements usually give you the maximum amount of isolation. Shoulder presses work the deltoids, the triceps and to some degree the traps; dumbbell, cable or machine laterals, on the other hand, allow you to isolate the deltoid muscles themselves, without involving other muscles or muscle groups in the effort. Furthermore, different exercises, such as front, side or rear deltoid raises, allow you to create even more isolation and target each head of the deltoid more-or-less specifically. This isolation vs. non-isolation training holds true for other major bodyparts as well. Bench presses work the pectorals, front delts and triceps, but flyes isolate the chest. Meanwhile, squats involve the quadriceps, hamstrings, adductors, glutes and hip flexors, while leg extensions isolate the quads and leg curls, the hamstrings. All complete bodybuilding routines should include both multijoint “power” movements and single-joint isolation exercises. However, how much of each type of exercise you do will vary depending on factors such as how far along you are in your overall development, whether you are training off-season or pre-contest, and so forth . SMALL MUSCLE TRAINING TECHNIQUE Bodybuilders should always strive to train strictly and correctly, but when training small muscles for maximum quality this becomes even more essential. The best way to achieve this strictness and correctness of technique is by making full use of the appropriate intensity training principles often talked about among hardcore lifters. One of the most important of these is full range of motion training – extending and stretching the muscle as much as possible at the bottom of the movement and fully contracting the muscle at the top. Full range of motion is important in single-joint movements to ensure that the entire length of the muscle is developed, but it’s especially important when training small muscles with multijoint exercises. Take the middle back, for example. The primary type of exercise for the entire upper back is a rowing movement of one kind or another. But the smaller muscles of the middle back don’t really come fully into play until the shoulders are drawn well back. It isn’t until you start to squeeze the shoulder blades together in the rear that these muscles begin to play a predominant part in the exercise. So unless you do at least some of your rows with a full range of motion and with as complete a peak contraction of the middle back muscles as possible, you can’t expect to direct the kind of intensity at these muscles that they require for optimum development. However, in achieving full range of motion with an exercise like rows, there is one other consideration to take into account: how much weight you’re using in the movement, because the heavier you lift, the less likely it is you’ll be able to work through the range of motion required for adequate small muscle training. HEAVY VS. LIGHT TRAINING: It’s difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between heavy and light training in bodybuilding. You simply choose a weight that is appropriate for the particular exercise and the type of set you’re doing. For example, it makes sense to use heavy weight and keep your reps relatively low when you’re trying to build mass and strength doing exercises like the bench press or bent-over barbell row. The muscles involved in these lifts are big and strong and it takes quite a bit of weight to sufficiently overload them. However, you would obviously use less weight doing an isolation exercise, such as the dumbbell flye, than you would for a multijoint dumbbell press. Furthermore, since isolating the rear delt means you are involving less muscle than you would for a side lateral, you would once again use less weight when training rear delts. In neither of these last two exercises are you “training light”. Given the kind of movements involved, which are certainly not mass-building power exercises, you would do sets more in the 10-12-rep range or higher rather than the 6-8 or 8-10 mass-building range. Also, these small muscles are relatively weak compared to bigger muscles such as the pecs or lats, so the maximum amount of resistance they can deal with will end up being comparatively small. But although you may be using a fairly light weight, you’re not training light, because you’re using the maximum amount of weight you can in those particular sets. Actually, choosing the appropriate weight is essential to achieving isolation. If you try to lift heavier than the target muscle or muscles can handle, your body will automatically recruit additional muscle to help with the lift. Try to do barbell curls with too much weight and suddenly the traps and lower back (and sometimes the legs as well!) kick in. Attempt to isolate the rear delts using dumbbells that weigh too much and all sorts of other adjacent back muscles will be recruited to make the lift possible. SMALL MUSCLE SURVIVAL MECHANISMS The body has developed strategies to protect small muscles from injury during heavy physical effort. One of them is that discussed above: the automatic recruitment of other, larger muscles to help whenever small muscles are subjected to a load they can’t handle. Another is the tendency of small muscles to simply go rigid and not contract at all when involved in an effort that also requires the contraction of much bigger muscles against large amounts of resistance. Take, for example, heavy barbell curls. Past a certain point, the heavier the weight, the less the biceps contract and the more work is done by other muscles. When the weight gets really heavy, dangerously heavy for the biceps, they simply go rigid. Watch somebody in the gym doing way-too-heavy curls some time. They rock the weight up using their legs and momentum; they bend backward, using a lot of lower back and throw the weight up toward their shoulders. But virtually none of the work is being done by the biceps. They are staying rigid, acting as a support member to help connect the bar to the rest of the body. The same thing can happen with a multijoint movement. When you do very heavy rows, for example, the big muscles of the upper back, such as the lats and the rhomboids, do most of the work. The smaller back muscles, on the other hand, are dangerously overloaded. Like the biceps, they go into a state of rigid contraction and act as a supporting structure rather than participating directly in the lift. Doing curls, it’s obvious that you only have to lighten the weight on the bar to once again achieve a sufficient degree of biceps isolation in the lift. The same holds true for rowing exercise – use a heavy weight in sets designed to develop and strengthen the large, powerful muscles of the back, but do rowing sets with much less weight, and a fuller range of motion, if you want to isolate and train the smaller inner and middle back muscles. When you do these sets, the weight will seem very light, almost too light. But that’s the point. The weight has to be light enough that the bigger lats and rhomboids are not really challenged, otherwise the target muscles will virtually go into spasm rather than contract through, what is for them, a full range of motion. SUMMARY Small muscle training is necessary, along with power movements for strength and mass, in order to achieve a completely developed physique. Without sufficient small muscle training, muscle imbalances occur, injuries are more likely, athletic performance suffers and weak points in the bodybuilding physique become apparent. Most small muscle training involves very strict technique, single-joint isolation exercises and full range of motion. Smaller muscles also have to be worked with the appropriate amount of weight; if you train small muscles too heavy, the body will automatically recruit other muscles to help in the effort. If the overload is sufficiently great, the small muscles will simply go rigid and act as support structures while other, bigger muscles perform the work required. M&F