One of the biggest mistakes you’re making in the gym is not developing your so-called “mind-muscle connection.” This term became popular back in the golden days of bodybuilding with the famed Arnold Schwarzenegger saying things like, “You need to have your mind inside your muscle.” While fitness trends come and go faster than cake at a fat kid’s birthday party, this one has lingered through the years for a good reason. Developing a strong connection between your brain and your muscles is one of the most efficient ways to put on mass and build strength.
Arnold was on to something when he talked about putting your mind in your muscle, which is something all of us already have. The control of your skeletal muscles is coordinated by something called your neuromuscular system. The movement of a muscle starts with a signal in the primary motor cortex in your brain. From there, it travels down a system of neurons where it interfaces with your muscle at a spot called the neuromuscular junction. A neurotransmitter called acetylcholine is then dumped on the muscle which causes a contraction to occur. For convenience, this system is broken up into two parts, upper and lower motor neurons. Upper motor neurons initiate and coordinate the signal, and the lower motor neurons transmit that signal to the muscle. These pathways exist for every muscle in your body, and most even have several.
What separates people like Arnold from an average lifter is the strength of this pathway, a dope ass accent and enough steroids to kill a horse. Putting aside the steroids and the accent, Arnold was unknowingly honing in on the idea of something called neuroplasticity. The basic idea behind this is that your nervous system is flexible and adapts to chronic signaling. Via a process called Long Term Potentiation, a neuron becomes more excitable when it's stimulated frequently. Think of this like traffic; if a road becomes too busy, another lane will be added to keep up with the increased usage. In our neuromuscular system, continuously focusing on the contraction is the equivalent of creating a busy road. Your nervous system senses this and strengthens that upper/lower motor neuron pathway by adding another lane. In practice, this means the more you focus on your muscle, the easier it will become to do so. This will lead to increased muscle activation and will cause increased amounts of muscle growth (1).
If you understood none of that, I will recap the important part. “Increased amounts of muscle growth.”
Stepping out of the lab and into the gym, we would call this process Attentional Focus. Attentional focus is what you are thinking about while you are performing a motor activity. Once again, this is broken into two different subgroups, internal and external attentional focus. External focus is thinking about what your movements are doing to the outside world. When squatting, you would think about pushing the ground away from you with your feet or driving the bar upward. Available data points to this being more useful for activities like powerlifting or fine-tuning motor skills. Internal focus on the other hand is more effective with increased muscle growth (2,3). Internal focus is analogous to mind-muscle connection and requires you to focus on the specific contraction you are performing.
Several studies quantified this using EMG data. By measuring electrical activity within the muscle, they showed focusing on a muscle massively increased the amount of activation during a specific exercise (1,4,5). One study saw a 22% increase in muscle activation after instructing subjects to “focus on chest muscles” during a bench press exercise (1).
The beauty in this comes when you combine this internal focus with the concept of neuroplasticity. You now understand that focusing on a specific muscle will alter signaling from your upper to your lower motor neurons. The increased strength of this signal will then increase the magnitude of the muscle contraction. You also understand the more you practice this focus, the stronger the pathway becomes via neuroplasticity. Knowing this, it should reason that a 22% increase in muscle activity following just one session is nothing compared to what will happen with time. The continuous practice of this over time will lead to it becoming similar to a reflex. Your nervous system will adapt to the point where picking up a weight will automatically trigger this response.
In practice, this will develop into something bodybuilders and weightlifters like to call the “squeeze.” Essentially this is that pre-cramp like feeling you get at the end of your range of motion on a given exercise. I’m sure this is something you have experienced before but is highly specific between individuals. Your ability to generate this squeeze is also highly indicative of how easily you will be able to put on muscle in that area. If you want to test this, simply walk around your body and flex every muscle as hard as you possibly can. With each muscle see how close you can get to that cramp like feeling. You will see that certain muscle groups generate this feeling much easier than others. This is the main reason you hear people complaining about not being able to put on that desired muscle in their chest, arms or various other places.
Luckily, even if you were not able to do that in the specific place you are looking to put on some muscle, you now know that your mind-muscle connection is trainable. In the words of Arnold, “There are no shortcuts – everything is reps, reps, reps.” A mind-muscle connection will not come overnight. To change your nervous system, you will need time and constant stimuli. So, lower the weight, focus on the muscle, and those biceps of your dreams are just around the corner.
References:
Snyder BJ and Fry WR. Effect of verbal instruction on muscle activity during the bench press exercise. J Strength Cond Res 26: 2394–2400, 2012
Vance J, Wulf G, Tollner T, McNevin N, and Mercer J. EMG activity as a function of the performer’s focus of attention. J Mot Behav 36: 450–459, 2004.
Wulf G. Attentional focus and motor learning: A review of 15 years. Int Rev Sport Exerc Psychol 6: 77–104, 2013.
Marchant DC, Greig M, and Scott C. Attentional focusing instructions influence force production and muscular activity during isokinetic elbow flexions. J Strength Cond Res 23: 2358–2366, 2009.
Snyder BJ and Leech JR. Voluntary increase in latissimus dorsi muscle activity during the lat pull-down following expert instruction. J Strength Cond Res 23: 2204–2209, 2009
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