Isolate Body Part

[AvgGuy]

As I recover from a arm injury I am going to start lifting more. I was doing a 3 day split and doing a full body work out each week. But I was thinking of trying this:


If I wanted to target just chest and all I did for 3 weeks was different types of bench press would this help grow that more?


For example:

Monday: Flat bench andd decline bench

Thursday: Incline bench and db presses

On the off days I may run, or bike. If I did this would my body only have to recover from the bench work out and all the nutrients/protein I eat would be going to that? On the 3 day split my body had to redirect/spread out the nutirents to more muscles that needed to recover.

Does this make any sense has any one tried it? :confused:

Thanks

[Chain]

It wont work better. It would actually probably be less effective. This is somewhat similar to the HIT training philosophy of optimizing recovery. But both are faulty philosophies for simliar reasons. Working more than one body part does put more stress on the body just as doing more than one set for an exercise does, but the body also steps up recovery mechanisms to deal with that increased stress. So if you just do bench, you'll make progress on the bench. But if you did squats too, not only would you progress on the bench and the squat but you might progress more on the bench than if you just did squats. This is because the size of the muscles worked has an effect on hormonal output from exercise. But the hormones released don't exclusively go to the muscle that was worked. A couple years back there was a study done where the participants did just a squat program but their bench presss weight went up as well. So, assuming you are eating and resting properly, focusing on just one bodypart at a time for a couple weeks is going to have you coming up short.

[AvgGuy]

Thanks for the info.