PAGAN
In fairness mate some of what you said is very true. It is easy to blame genetics and many people myself included to end up neglecting weaknesses because they become frustrated with them.
I train for strongman comps now so I'll use an example based on this.I've always struggled with overhead lifting in comparison to many of my competitors. I never looked forward to training overhead and was quick to spit my dummy out and move onto something else when I failed a lift.Overhead events continued to cost me big points in comps and I just generally felt negative about it all.
Last year I qualified for BSM U90K which had a FTOH event with a 125k barbell. My PB at the time was a piss poor 105K. At first I simply resigned myself to 'no repping' on that event but decided I would actually plan my training to prioritise overhead and shoot for the impossible in the hope that if nothing else it might add another 5k or so to my PB.
This mind set seemed to take the pressure off my training and I didn't feel as negative going into workout. Low and behold I started making progress and over the course of a few weeks my PB crept up until the week before the comp I managed 125kx2.
Obviously this shows that the right mindset and hard work can help overcome weaknesses, however ...I failed the lift at the comp and compared to most of my U90k peers my overhead is still sh*te!
I've trained with weights for over twenty years and lost count of the number of training partners I've had who have made better progress than me despite a worse diet and many more missed sessions.
I'm a natural ectomorph. My wrists and ankles are tiny. My forearm , calves and biceps have little narrow muscle bellies with high insertions. All the training , protein and drugs in the world won't make them really impressive.
Christ knows if any of that makes sense or explains my viewpoint or lasts nights outburst but I hope it does in some way.
Pagan,
Yeah, it all makes sense, I must admit i was alittle surprised as I find your posts are very well thought out and make interesting reading so I just imagined I'd hit a nerve (unintentionally).
Just to try and explain why I thought like I did.
I too have a delicate frame (just over 6" wrists), I've always had puny arms and biggish (for my frame) calfs and always blamed it on how I'm made up. All the men in my family are the same build, around 6 foot tall with a slight frame and all have puny arms. I am the only one however, with decent calfs and I'm also the only one who's cycled lots and rowed.
Since I've been training I've managed to increase my upper arm measurement by an inch in 14 weeks which surprised the hell out of me. This got me thinking that I was wrong about my puny arms being purely genetic and that finding the right training regime (for me) has made them grow. I then thought further that my calfs are bigger than the rest of my families as I have trained them hard for years cycling and rowing so again the genetic thing didn't seem the whole reason behind that either.
I do believe that there is only so much you can do with what you've got but I also think that it's easier to focus on your strengths rather than your weaknesses and find a convenient reason to explain things away.
I think calfs are harder to focus on, there's not so much variety as for biceps/triceps and a lot of people tend to focus their attention on their arms as we all want a good set of arms to show off.
In a way I came across as saying the calf equivalent of "shut up and Squat" (which seems to be a cool thing to say), I guess it was my delivery that was even more flawed than my thinking.
I'm very keen to learn so I'd love to know more about why calfs appear to be so hard for many people to develop, are they in some way different to other muscles in the body in the way they respond to training. When I was a gym member there were lots of guys with very big upper bodies and tiny calfs, I just assumed they didn't give them the same attention as their arms.