stalling a bit on my presses...don't worry?

[mike0292]

usually eat bowl of cheerios + banana + glass of milk and protein shake before workout

[Blarg]

Your legs and glutes are doing the lifting in squats, and they are enormous and very durable compared to the muscles you use to press with. They are comparatively easy to see progress in size and strength with, because incremental improvements on muscles that large are also large themselves.

Just playing with numbers for the concept, say you can military press 50 lbs. and your strength increases 1% in a week. You're only up half a pound in what you can lift. You probably wouldn't notice at all. You probably wouldn't even notice that in a month you could lift two more pounds. Say the size of your shoulders and triceps increase 1% in that week too. You probably wouldn't even notice. After 20 weeks at that rate, you'd see a 20% increase, which would be nice, but wouldn't blow you away. You might feel like you were a very slow gainer.

If you could squat 200 pounds and gained 1% a week in strength, next week you'd be squatting two pounds more. Not much, but almost two five pound plates in a month. In 20 weeks, you'd be up 40 pounds, to 240. 20 weeks of military pressing at that rate of gain and you'd be up from 50 to 60 pounds, a gain of 10 pounds for your arms versus 40 for your legs. And if you added on 20% to the one or two pounds of shoulder meat you started with, it wouldn't be that noticeable. But say your leg/glute for each side weighed something like 50 pounds each, and you increased that 20% -- that's an extra twenty pounds of muscle on your legs and glutes, ten pounds each, and that would definitely be noticeable. The results of your military press wouldn't really affect how you wear your shirts, but the results of your squats/deadlifts would definitely make your pants feel much tighter.