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How Your Mind Can Build Your Muscles!

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We have all heard phrases like “your mind is the most powerful muscle in your body”, or “we only use 10% of our brains capacity”, or in this case the critical one “you have to build the mind-muscle connection”. However, have you ever really thought about what they mean, especially the last one, and also what impact it might have if you could really switch on some of that extra brain capacity, especially in relation to your muscles.

For the purposes of this article I’m only focusing on the brain and your minds ability to enhance your physique and help you build a better body. So if you are a budding Einstein, Mozart or Newton, you’d best look elsewhere, this article is not going to help.

The Mind Muscle Connection:

So what exactly do we mean by the often used phrase “the mind muscle connection”. Well, to be honest, it’s exactly what it says on the tin. It is about finding and using the ability to tune your thoughts and your mind into the specific muscles that you are working at a particular moment. What do i mean by that? Well let me give you some examples.

How many times have you gone to the Gym or done a workout with a specific goal in mind, or even followed a programme for a period of time, and then come away disappointed. You haven’t really felt it the next day, weren’t sore in the areas you expected to be sore, or simply after a period of time, just weren’t getting the results that you expected. It is very possible, even likely that the reason for this is that you weren’t correctly working the muscles you intended to work, and therefore just weren”t getting the results you wanted.

Again I’ll give you some examples. You are working your chest doing some form of press (bench press, dumbbell press, incline press), but instead of getting a good chest pump and soreness the next day your triceps give out first or you feel pain in your shoulder joints. The same may go for shoulder press where you end up using triceps, Lat pull downs where you end up using biceps etc etc.

Another common fault is where people try to use too heavy weights and end up swinging them into position or forcing them up, thus using a whole variety of different muscles and muscle groups, other than the one your are actually trying to work.

In short people are not actually thinking about what they are doing and not focusing their mind on what they want to achieve and how to go about doing it. This is often driven by ego. Lets be honest we have all been guilty of trying to outdo the guy next to us in the Gym, or just throw some extra weight on in the hope that extra weight equals extra muscle.

The solution to this is very simple and there are three or four key elements that if you use correctly and every time, will have a really dramatic impact on the results you achieve.

Key Mind Tips:

These are my key mind tips which if you use will boost your gains and results enormously.

  1. The first is really simple. Concentrate on the specific muscle you want to work while doing the exercise. Feel that actual muscle contracting and extending and whilst doing the concentric part of the movement really try to squeeze the muscle as hard as you can. Do that for each rep, and at the same time, try as much as possible not to engage or use other muscles around it. This is quite hard at first but with a bit of practise it comes naturally.
  2. Concentrate on form and tempo, and lower the weights from what you would normally do. This is vital. To start with lower the weights around 20/25% from what you would normally use. Do each rep slowly and concentrate on squeezing the weight up (or down) and then controlling it slowly on the way back down. Believe me this is really hard and there is no way you will do full sets with the amount of weight you normally use if you do it this way. The eccentric or lowering phase if done really slowly is just as important as the lift or squeeze itself.
  3. Use a full range of motion. Use strict form, don’t swing the weight up which often shortens the lift, and when lowering the weight really feel the stretch of the muscle and open up the joint as much as possible whilst still keeping it under control.
  4. Finally, try to keep the muscle you are using under tension the whole time. What this often means is that you won’t quite lock out at either the top of the bottom of the movement. By doing this you ensure that the muscle being used is constantly under tension, constantly being used and gets no sneaky little rests.

Watch this guys video here. He covers a number of these points and demonstrates what i mean about controlling the reps, really focusing on the specific muscle you are trying to work, and keeping tension in the muscle.

As I already said, if you do this strictly you will find your workouts will change immensely. Number one you’ll be super tired after completing them. Number two, you’ll be very sore the next day (and hopefully in all the right places). Number three, you will absolutely have to use lower weights, but Number Four, don’t worry about that because after a month of doing this you will make monster gains in both your muscle size and strength.

I hope you enjoyed this article. Please give it a try and I’d really welcome your comments and thoughts once you have done it. if you enjoy the article please share, comment, like etc etc blah blah.

Take Care,

John

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Weight Training: Volume or Time instead of Reps!

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Arnold 2We all would love a torso like Arnolds right? If you are into weight training then you’d have to be crazy not to think Mr Schwarzenegger looked incredible in his prime. However, genetics, an unbelievable amount of hard work and probably some illicit substances all went towards making him the icon he is.

If you are like me, a fairly ordinary guy, you’d be pretty happy looking even half as good as he did. However, even to achieve that, especially as you get a bit older, still takes a lot of hard work, clean eating and heavy lifting. You CAN achieve great things if you put your mind to it but even the most dedicated weight trainers will become a bit jaded from time to time. One of the reasons for this is repetition. You can mix up your exercises as much as possible but 90% of people will still end up doing a fixed number of reps and sets. Depending on if you are training for size and muscular growth, or just for strength, I can pretty much guarantee that you’ll end up doing something like 4 or 5 sets of 6-12 reps on most exercises. Over a period of time, when you have been doing that for month after month it can become hard to stay motivated. So what do you do about it? Well below I’ve detailed two different methods which you may not have tried before but which can bring some variety and even new gains and improvement to your time worn routines.

Volume Training:

Initially this can be a slightly difficult concept to get your head around and the first thing you’ll need to take to the Gym with you is a small pen and pad. This is the way it works. Lets say you are training your Chest, you will need to count the total volume of weight that you lift across all your reps and sets for all your chest exercises. You can do it in pounds or kilograms, whatever floats your boat. So let me illustrate this for you with a full example and breakdown of a typical workout. I’ll use nice round figures on the weights to keep it simple.

Barbell Bench Press: 5 sets of 10 reps @ 80kg . So 10 reps would be 10 x 80kg = 800kg. 5 sets of that is 5 x 800 = 4000kg Lifted.

Barbell Incline Press: 5 sets of 10 @ 50kg. 10 reps would be 500kg. 5 sets of that is 2500kg.

Dumbbell Decline Press: 4 sets of 10 @ 60kg (30kg each hand). 10 x 60kg = 600kg. 4 sets of that 2400kg.

Dumbbell Flys: 4 sets of 10 @ 30kg (15kg each hand). 10 x 30kg = 300kg. 4 sets = 1200kg.

So in total for your chest you have lifted 10,100 kg for your chest. Keep a record of that and the next time you train your chest make sure you lift more total volume than that figure. You can do that by using exactly the same exercises but increasing the weight, doing more over all reps or simply by doing some extra sets or exercises. You can use this technique for all body parts. Keep your records to hand, make sure you document them and train this way for a couple of months. You will be amazed at the amount of extra volume you can add in a couple of months and if you work hard will be equally amazed at the gains in size and strength that you make using this method.

Stopwatch weights

Time:

By time i DO NOT mean the length of time you actually spend in the Gym and train for. I’m a big advocate of getting in and out of the Gym quickly, 60/70 minutes absolute max…..you do have a life after all. What i mean by time is “time under tension” for the muscle. The way you do this is to do an exercise for a fixed period of time such as 40 seconds. You need to use a weight that you can lift smoothly and continuously as the trick is to have the muscle constantly under tension for the entire 40 seconds. Don’t pause at the top or bottom of a rep, try to keep the weight moving the whole time. However do not rush, you need to maintain strict and correct form throughout the exercise. This is surprisingly hard and you may well need to lower the weight compared to what you would normally use when just doing a set number of reps. By the 3rd or 4th set you will be struggling by the time you get to 30 seconds but its important to keep pushing through to the end even if you end up doing half reps for the last few seconds.

The key here is the continuous time under tension for the muscle. By giving it no time to rest and being constantly under strain it forces the muscles into something called Hypertrophy which is the state that makes your muscles grow. You can use this technique for every exercise you do and it makes for a seriously intense workout when done properly. It will initially take some experimentation with the weights but once you get it right you will love the pump and growth you get from using this method. Again, try it for a couple of months and see what happens.

So if you use the standard Reps method, Volume method and Time under tension method you now have three different ways of training. By changing things up your body never knows what to expect and this in turn helps you to keep growing and improving. For any of these methods to really work you need to give them some time. It’s no good doing it once and then going back to reps. Trust me, pick one of the methods and do it for 4 times a week for all your body parts and see where you are after a month, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Take care,

John