How to Train a Lagging Body Part With an Injury (Work Around It)

How to Train a Lagging Body Part When You Have an Injury

If you have a weak chest, you suck at bench press, do more fucking bench press. The weak thing gets stronger when you do more of it, and that stays true when something hurts, because the answer to a sore shoulder is almost never zero chest work, it's different chest work.

If you struggle with pull-ups or lat pull-downs or whatever the case may be, the obvious solution to that problem is to do more of it, right? Not less. Most people treat a weak body part the same way they treat a painful one, as something to protect, and protection is exactly what keeps it small.

Muscle grows when a fiber gets high tension across a decent range of motion, often enough for that signal to stay switched on. None of that depends on a specific exercise. Tension doesn't know whether it came from a barbell or a cable.

So if you have a lagging body part and there's an injury involved, what you need to do is find a way to work around that so you can continue to develop it.

Working around it means you keep the muscle and change everything else. The implement, the joint angle, the range you train in, the number of limbs involved. A flat barbell bench that lights up your shoulder can become a machine press where the handles move independently, or a slight incline that puts the shoulder in a less loaded position, or a cable fly where the weight is light but the pec is loaded hard at length. Same muscle, same signal, different route to it.

The range of motion piece matters more than people expect. If the bottom six inches of a press is where the pain lives, you can still train the top two thirds heavy. You're carving out the part that hurts and keeping the part that works, which means the body part never actually gets skipped.

And a perfect example of somebody I'll use to kind of describe this is if you guys know Fuad from the Real Bodybuilding podcast. He had a motorcycle accident, lost the use of his arm, and he's still training. Not waiting it out. Training everything that still functions, keeping the stimulus on every part of him he can reach.

If a guy with one working arm finds a way to keep training, a sore elbow is not a reason to drop a whole muscle group for three months.

There's a second cost to stopping, and it's the one people miss. The muscle shrinks, but the tissue around it also gets less tolerant of load, so when you come back twelve weeks later the weight that used to feel easy now feels aggressive and you get hurt again. Deconditioning writes the script for the next injury.

Keeping some load on the area, even light, even partial, even on a machine you think is beneath you, holds onto that tolerance. The goal in those weeks isn't growth. It's keeping the tissue from forgetting how to handle weight at all.

Finding the version of the movement that doesn't hurt and running it hard enough to matter covers most of what you need. If a free weight hurts, try a machine. If both arms together hurt, go one arm at a time. If the full range hurts, train the half that doesn't while you sort the other half out.

Find those things that you're weak at and focus on developing those things too, and push them harder once the pain-free version is dialed in. If not more, then you do everything else.

A lagging body part and an injured body part feel like two separate problems, which is why people add work for one and remove work for the other. Underneath, they're the same situation: something isn't getting trained, and the fix is finding a way to train it anyway.