Everyone has different body compositions. If I break it down in simple terms, two people with similar height and weight will look different physically due to musculature. Every person has some lagging body parts that they want to improve, and that is where prioritizing the muscle groups comes in. Our body has 8 major muscle groups: Arms, Chest, Shoulders, Back, Abdomen, Thighs, Glutes, and Calves.
Prioritizing muscle groups means putting focus on developing one or multiple muscle groups relative to the others.
In this article, I will discuss the things you need to know when you want to prioritize a muscle group. There are some common questions that everyone faces while prioritizing muscle groups. In this article, I will try to answer all the common questions in a simple way.
Contents
Why do you need to prioritize?
There can be different motives for prioritizing any muscle group. Different people have different reasons, but if it is summed up, then it can be brought down to 2 major reasons why people want to prioritize muscle groups
- Want to make them bigger
One of the primary reasons for prioritizing a muscle group is simply to make it bigger. Most people want to achieve a stronger, bigger, and more aesthetic look, so they want to put decent-sized muscles in their frames. To improve one or multiple muscle groups, you need to prioritize them.
- Maintain a balance or improve lacking muscle groups
This reason mostly applies to athletes or professionals, especially those who are bodybuilders. Some people have a big upper body but lack in the lower body region. To get a balanced physique or to overcome the lack of muscle groups, prioritization of muscle groups is needed.
How can you prioritize muscle groups?
After deciding which muscle group or groups you need to prioritize for growth, you need to start working on them. There are some simple tricks that you can use.
Train the prioritized muscle group at the start of the session
You must train the muscle groups you need to grow at the very beginning of each session when they are fresh. Exercises for other non-prioritized muscle groups need to be pushed further back in the training session.
Simply think that you want to make your chest bigger. You start your training session with delts, and after that, you train your arms. At the very end, you save the chest exercises and decide to go all out on them. Yes, you can train them, but it will not be ideal, let alone prioritized. If you do delts and arms before chest exercises, then you will face problems. You will lack energy and will not be able to push much harder as fatigue will be generated in the body even before you start training your prioritized muscle.
Lower the volume of other muscle groups
When you want to prioritize a muscle group, there will be a trade-off. You need to lower the volume of other muscle groups. The reason behind that is that you need to balance out your systemic fatigue and recoverable volume.
Simply put, you can do 30 sets a week (hypothetically) for all muscle groups. Doing more than that will make you so tired that you cannot recover. So, to balance out, when you prioritize muscle groups, you will decrease the other muscle groups’ volume and increase the prioritized muscle group’s volume. Do not worry about losing muscle from non-prioritized muscle groups, as maintaining the same muscle mass requires one-third of the volume.
For example, you wake up daily, jog for an hour, and then go to tennis practice. If you want to improve in tennis, you need to lower the jogging and put more time into tennis practice. You can do both simultaneously, as it will generate a lot of fatigue. The same thing applies to exercises as well.
Increase the frequency
When you focus on developing particular muscle groups, you need to increase their frequency.
It is recommended that you train the focused muscle group at the beginning of the training session, give it at least one day’s rest, and then train those muscles again. You can train the focused muscle group 2-3 times each week. Training two times is the minimum, as you will be fully utilizing protein muscle synthesis.
How many muscles do you need to prioritize?
There is no single answer to this question. It mainly depends on which muscle groups you are trying to prioritize. If you prioritize relatively small muscle groups, such as arms and shoulders, you can prioritize multiple groups simultaneously. However, when you are focusing on larger muscle groups like quads or back, it will be wise to focus on only them, or you can go for one big muscle group and one small muscle group. Do not try to prioritize two larger muscle groups together.
How many muscle groups you can prioritize depends on your total MRV (Maximum Recoverable volume). If you choose to train 4 muscle groups and you can manage your total MRV, then you are good to go.
MRV (Maximum Recoverable Volume) is the maximum number of sets you can perform for specific body parts throughout the week and be able to recover fully before the upcoming session.
As mentioned previously, MRV will be higher for small muscle groups and lower for large muscle groups.
How long do you need to continue prioritizing?
The ideal number of months to continue a priority period is between two and three. Usually, it is referred to as two or three mesocycles, but for ease of understanding, consider three months as an ideal time period.
After continuing for over three months, go for a deload. At that time, train the prioritized muscles with comparatively lower intensity so that they can fully recover. At least go for two or three weeks of deloading. It will help to ease up the muscle and lower the fatigue that is generated. After that, you can either go for prioritization again if you think you still need it or balance out your training.