Getting (More) Jacked for Spring Break Part I
Putting specialization programs into context for intermediate lifters for Spring Break
In a recent post, I explained what specialization programs are and how they are useful for surpassing plateaus.
Here, we’ll start to dive deeper with a practical example for using a specialized program: getting (more) jacked for spring break in 12 weeks.
Why Use a Specialization Program For Spring Break?
If you’re a beginner, then simply starting to lift weights will allow you to make significant changes to your physique in 12 weeks.
However, if you’re an intermediate who already outgrew their beginner gains, then making progress in this amount of time isn’t as easy–building muscle takes time. This is especially true if you focus on building muscle across your whole body.
But, you can likely make visually significant progress if you focus on a few muscle groups in particular with a specialization program. This allows you to ramp up both your training volume (how many sets you complete for a given muscle group per week) as well as your training frequency (how many times you train a given muscle group per week).
But, why not do this for all of your muscle groups at once? Technically, you could, but it would be difficult for several reasons.
First, in order to make large improvements in a given muscle group in this amount of time you want to significantly raise your training volume and frequency.
Your body likely does not have sufficient recovery and growth resources (think food, sleep, and general ability to adapt to the training) to effectively respond to these increases for all of your muscle groups at once.
On the other hand, if you raise volume and frequency selectively, the majority of those recovery and growth resources are now focused on those select muscle groups.
In addition, by focusing on your whole body you’re simply splitting your energy between these muscle groups. For example, let’s say you really want to grow your shoulders. If you hit a lot of hard sets for your legs and back twice a week each, you’ll likely be taking away at least a little bit (probably more) from your shoulders training on the other days.
On the other hand, if you cut back on how hard and how much you train your legs and back for a period of time, you’ll have more time and energy to train the heck out of your shoulders.
Dr. Mike Israetel, P.h.D. in sport physiology, explained this aspect well in this video when he said,
“If aliens were coming down to Earth to zap society dead if you didn’t do everything you could to get the biggest arms possible over the next month, would you train anything other than arms? No.”
Lastly, trying to prioritize every muscle group at once would mean completing extremely long training sessions 6-7 days per week. Though fun for some people, this is not feasible or desirable for most people from a schedule perspective. And, even if it were, as I alluded to above, it probably isn’t feasible from a recovery standpoint.
Now that we’ve identified why a specialization program makes sense for getting (more) jacked for Spring Break in ~12 weeks, let’s get into the specifics of how to do this. In Part II, we’ll discuss which muscle groups to prioritize to look the most jacked for Spring Break.