The Shape Training Myth

INTRODUCTION
Bodybuilding is full of wishful exercise and diet myths borne of our innate need to feel in control of our circumstances. None of us wants to accept that our short biceps, fat bums, narrow clavicles, or toothpick calves can’t be improved. Even if we accept that we might be unable to achieve perfection, we still need to believe we can neutralise our aesthetic weaknesses.

This article is a mixture of good and bad news for those of you training to ‘shape’ your body rather than just build size. The good news is that you do have massive control over your overall shape. Even better news is that those changes that you can make can be made quite quickly.

But the bad news is that just about everything you’ve read or been told about ‘shape training’ is probably untrue. Worse than that, following the popular ‘shape training’ advice will probably ensure that you fail to achieve the shape you could have otherwise. Read on if you want to know what works and what doesn’t.

FOUNDATIONS
Before we even begin discussing dietary, chemical and exercise interventions for shaping muscles, something must be said about your base structure; your skeleton.

Your skeleton is the frame upon which all your muscles attach. Without some sort of violent surgical procedure (or pre-pubertal genetic manipulation) you are not going to be able to change your skeletal structure and therefore your overall shape is set before you even start training.

MUSCLE ATTACHMENTS
Where and how your muscles attach to your skeleton is another fixed, structural quality that profoundly affects your shape. In fact, it is your muscle attachments that ultimately determine the shapes of each and every muscle in your body. The tissue in between the attachments can only get bigger or smaller.

Using the thighs as an example, whether you are ever going to have an outer thigh ‘sweep’ like Capriese Murray or Lenda Murray depends upon where your outer thigh muscle (Vastus Lateralis) attaches at the hip* and knee* as well as the size and shape of your hips and femur.

Whether you will ever have an inner-thigh region that appears full and round from the knee to the groin like Jon Davie depends significantly upon where the Gracilis, Sartorius and Adductor Longus attach (among others). If your Gracilis attaches closer to the front of your knee and your Sartorius attaches further around your hip toward your groin then you are likely to be forever frustrated with a thin, bowed looking lower thigh similar to Greg Kovacs (though probably not quite as big). And all the hip adducting exercises in the world won’t change that.

In the case of your arm, if you have ‘short biceps’ like Luke Wood (where there seems to be a large gap between your bicep and forearm) then you will always have short biceps. You cannot build muscle where there is only tendon. So if you get a big burn and pump in the bicep tendon from those preacher curls you read would build your ‘lower biceps’, that’s actually an injury!

The depth of separations between muscles is also largely determined by their attachments. If the muscle attachments create wide, flat muscles with significant overlaps then your separations will never be particularly deep. And all the peak-contraction, isolation exercises in the world will be unable to ‘carve’ out any separations.

So subtle differences in the attachment points of different people’s muscles profoundly affect the ultimate visual impression made by their physiques. And short of surgical detachment and reattachment, there is nothing you can do about what your genetics gave you. You just have to work with them.

But before you hang up your training belt and quit bodybuilding forever, consider that Ronnie Coleman, Dorian Yates and Lee Haney have all been widely criticised for their poor abdominal muscles’ shape and structure among other faults. Yet these 3 men have collectively held the Worlds greatest bodybuilding title for over 20 years!

So just because your structure isn’t perfect doesn’t mean it can’t be totally awesome. Just be realistic about what you hope to look like.

MUSCLE TYPES?
There is no tissue in the body known as ‘bulk’. Neither is there a type of muscle known as ‘toned muscle’. Muscle is only muscle. How hard, soft, separated, cut, vascular or ‘toned’ it looks is a function mainly of how much fat covers it.

Front row Rugby forwards don’t have ‘bulk’ – they have a lot of muscle covered in a lot of fat. They might not be fat by comparison to the slobs in the pub watching them play but the reason they don’t look hard and defined is because they are fat.

So you cannot ‘build bulk’; there is no such thing. Neither can you develop a bulky physique as a result of exercise choice. But you can cover your muscle with a layer of fat giving the ‘bulky’ appearance of front row rugby players.

Similarly, you cannot build ‘cut’ or ‘separated’ muscles as opposed from building bigger muscles with obviously deeper gaps between them. But you can reduce your muscle blurring body fat to see the cuts and separations already between your muscles.

LOGICAL ADAPTATIONS
Muscle growth occurs as a logical adaptation to extremely stressful levels of muscular tension; otherwise known as stinking heavy weights!

Muscle exists to exert the forces necessary to create movement. Different types of exercise – stressful movement – will stimulate different adaptations within the muscle. But these adaptations will always relate to the functional force generating capacity of the muscle; either making the muscle able to apply force longer, faster, through a greater range of movement or just produce more peak force.

Like all adaptations, the bodies response to weight training stresses will be the least required to get the job done. Despite what many bodybuilding writers will make it sound like, the body is not interested in making extravagant, extraneous changes to muscle form and structure for the purpose of improving our external aesthetic form. Unfortunately, the psychological stress of possessing a subjectively unattractive body does not induce positive physical adaptations in muscle.

You cannot build ‘thigh sweep’ or peaked biceps or wide pecs if you weren’t born with the structural potential (the combination of skeletal structure and muscular attachments) to do so. And if you were born with great structure then you can still only increase the overall size of the muscle in the areas you already have it.

SHAPING VS MASS BUILDING EXERCISES
While the basic compound exercises such as squats, deadlifts, rows, and presses are often described as ‘mass builders’, many other exercises are touted as ‘shaping’ exercises. Shaping exercises apparently train their respective muscles from different ‘angles’ thereby allowing you to change the shape of your muscles. Nonsense!

A more correct categorisation for weight training exercises would be ‘potent’ and ‘impotent’. An exercises’ effectiveness or potency can be measured by how comparatively quickly body composition changes (muscle gains) are made. And in all cases you will find a basic ‘mass builder’ outperforms a ‘shaping’ exercise.

The simple fact is that an exercises ability to stimulate muscle growth is the sole determining factor as to whether it can positively affect your body composition (ratio of fat to muscle) and therefore your shape. That means that even if you are a bodyshaper you should be doing heavy deadlifts and presses to look your shapliest.

The inefficiency of shaping exercises for developing muscle is well recognised even by those who recommend their employment in a training program. As such, it is frequently recommended in bodybuilding literature that a trainer should build mass with ‘mass building exercises’ before later trying to shape it with ‘shaping movements’. The inference is that once a quantity of muscle tissue has been developed for functional reasons, the body will then happily disassemble and reassemble the muscle proteins with an all new shape; extending or reducing attachments, adding partial-length fibres where there were none previously and disproportionately thickening sections of muscle for no functional purpose whatsoever. And all of this will apparently happen in response to an exercise that is incapable of developing the muscle from the start.

Though we might wish the body was aesthetically generous and functionally schizophrenic in response to otherwise impotent, ineffective exercises, it isn’t. Adaptations to exercise are logical and functional. And while unnatural positioning of your feet during Hack Machine Squats might eventually require a new cruciate ligament, it is unlikely to require a kilo of functionally useless, partial length muscle fibres added to the outside portion of your thigh (Vastus Lateralis)!

TRUTH ABOUT SHAPING EXERCISES
Shaping exercises tend to fall into 2 categories: single joint isolation exercises and regular compound movements done with an abnormal body position.

Single joint isolation movements fit the category of ‘impotent’ exercises described above. By nature, isolation exercises require lighter loads than compound movements for the same muscle. And by nature, isolating a muscle means that the lighter load being used is applied to much less musculature.

Isolation exercises usually hurt like hell! You can achieve a very intense, isolated burn unlike that felt from compound movements. They FEEL as though they are working the muscle very hard. And they are. The problem is that they do not provide a particularly intense systemic stress and therefore the adaptive response is minimal. No matter how hard you feel you are training with isolation exercises, the inherent stress is light; i.e. not intense.

Using abnormal body positions on compound movements – like pointing your toes in or out while squatting – to train a different aspect of a muscle is simply dangerous. If it was possible to work the outer thigh at the expense of the inner thigh during squats, for example, then the knee joint would have to be subjected to enormous sheering and rotational stresses that would inevitably lead to chronic injury.

Similarly, changing a compound exercise so that far less weight can be lifted does not make the exercise more effective or intense. By definition, a lighter weight means that a movement it is less intense, less effective and typically damaging to the joints. That burn you feel in your outer pecs during bench presses to the neck is likely to be a nerve impingement in the acromion complex or a strain to one or all of the rotator cuff muscles. And there is going to be little stimulus for pec growth when you halve the weight stress that the torso normally accommodates.

TRUTH ABOUT MASS BUILDING EXERCISES
The basic ‘mass building’ exercises are the most effective, efficient exercises you can use. They apply the greatest load stress upon the body thereby inducing the most significant adaptive, muscle growth response. These exercises include squats, deadlifts, rows, bench presses, seated or standing presses – basically any multi-joint compound movement.

Mass builders won’t make you ‘massive’, ‘bulky’ or ‘blocky’. That myth comes from the fact that big, bulky, blocky looking people with wide hips tend to be very good at lifting big weights on basic compound exercises.

But, as explained above, your structure has already been set by your genetics. If you are big and blocky then the use of light, ineffective exercises is not going to make you small and/or shapely.

Heavy mass building exercises are the most efficient for maximising your natural muscular shape. And when it comes down to it, maximising what you’ve been structurally handed is all you can do anyway.

Heavy, compound exercises actually enable you to carry the greatest possible lean mass at any given body size. In other words, they are the best exercises for making you as lean and muscular as you need. If you don’t want excessive size, don’t worry; excessive size doesn’t tend to happen by accident. Besides which, your size is a function of how much you eat. How strong you are only determines how much of you is muscle.

QUANTIFICATION: THE REAL ISSUE
Consider how much muscle you can expect to gain in a year of focussed mass building. The late Mike Mentzer based his exercise calculations on expecting no more than 5kilos of new muscle per year. Pro bodybuilder Dexter Jackson says not to expect more than 2.5kg per year. And some Natural Bodybuilding ‘experts’ have publicly recommended lowering your expectations to 1-2kg per year.

Whatever quantity of muscle you expect to gain in a year of focussed mass building, it will be several multiples more than you could expect to gain in a year of focussed ‘shaping’ training. In short, you can expect to gain pretty close to nothing in an entire year of training with ‘shaping’ exercises.

And if virtually no net gain is the best possible result from using supposed ‘shaping’ exercises for a year, how much change can you expect to the shape of your physique? We already established above that the notion of a muscle structurally reconstructing itself for no functional purpose is absurd as well as technically impossible. If there is any possibility of any change being made to a physique with exactly the same quantity of muscle, on the same skeleton, with the same muscle attachments, then that change will be totally imperceptible.

Yet if you’d focussed on supposed mass building you could have achieved a significant improvement in your muscle mass and therefore your body composition and your shape.

CONCLUSION
Through effective, hard, heavy weight training and strict dieting you can sculpt yourself an amazing body with fantastic shape. But you cannot change the structural shape of your body.

As such, regardless of your specific goals and structural weaknesses an exercise program for bodybuilding/shaping should always be focussed on heavy weights using basic compound movements.

Other than to train through injury, recover from a period of overtraining or successful overreaching, ‘shaping’ movements are never required or effective. They can be fun for something different to do when you are bored but otherwise supposed ‘shaping’ movements do not shape your muscles.

* (technically correct terminology abandoned in favour of spatially and communicatively superior options)


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