Vanity Muscles

What muscles did you work today? Let me guess, if you’re a male you worked your chest and biceps and if you’re a female you worked your legs, thighs, and glutes? It seems to me that in general most men and most women seem to concentrate more on these respective areas.

Why? Because these are the vanity muscles. These are the muscles you see when you look in the mirror. And let’s face it; men are conditioned to think their chest and biceps should be big and developed from childhood and women are bombarded with magazine covers and pop culture suggesting their lower half is what needs to be sculpted But if these are the only muscles you train, your workout is seriously flawed.

You are not going to develop that physique you may be picturing if those are the only muscles you train. If anything you are overtraining them, and you are going to make your body asymmetric, thus leaving you open to more injury and an oddly shaped body. First off, overtraining is not going to help you make gains, it’s counter productive to making gains. Overworked muscles do not grow or develop. Also, any development in those vanity muscles will also seriously be stalled if you do not workout the rest of your body. You will get leaner faster if you work every muscle in the body (yes guys, that includes legs too) at least one time per week.

Doing the same routine over and over is another gym no-no. The body thrives on variety. You will either get bored or your body will plateau and you may stop seeing development altogether. If you did bench press and dumbbell curls last week, this week do an incline dumbbell press and cable curls. If you did squats last week, do lunges this week. There are hundreds of different ways to mix it up.

I know it’s tempting to go into the gym and plop right down to work on those vanity muscles, and this is fine, it just means that you are working those muscles that day, which, in turn means the next day that you go into the gym, you need to work other muscles.