Blog · 3 min · figures checked on 9 November 2026
How to bring up a lagging muscle?
By Nicolas Papon, founder of Live For Fit ·
Give it more sets, put it at the start of the session, and choose exercises that target the part of the muscle that is missing. A muscle does not grow the same way everywhere.
What the research says
Wakahara et al. (2013) show that hypertrophy is not uniform along a muscle.
Zabaleta-Korta et al. (2021) show that the choice of exercise steers which region of the muscle grows.
For volume, the meta-analysis by Schoenfeld, Ogborn and Krieger (2017) links more sets to more muscle, up to a point.
What Live For Fit does
At Live For Fit: Your photo analysis reads each muscle and gives it a status. A lagging muscle gets 10 to 14 sets a week, a muscle far behind gets 14 to 20.
At Live For Fit: It goes at the start of the session, and its exercises are chosen according to the part of the muscle to work. Muscles that are ahead go on maintenance, to make room.
- How many sets per muscle per week to build muscle? ›
- How many times a week should you train a muscle? ›
We publish Live For Fit. This information does not replace medical advice.