Are your workouts working out?
Ever feel like you’re spending hours at the gym every week and not seeing the results you want?
Congrats, you're not alone! Good news first. You probably aren’t setting yourself up for success. Focus is maybe the most underrated tool every single person can access whenever they want. And it’s the best tool there is to make the same workouts you’re already doing more effective. Easy right? Ok, maybe not all the time. What has surprised many of my clients is finding out there is actual research that demonstrates if you simply THINK about a muscle firing, while you’re firing that muscle, you will be able to move more weight! I know, it sounds far fetched. But the mind muscle connection is a real one. I won’t get too far down the rabbit hole of anatomy and science here but if you take a second to think about it, this shouldn’t really be surprising.
“Strength” in its most literal sense is your body’s capacity to simultaneously activate all the muscles necessary to accomplish a specific movement. Muscle size certainly does play a role. But your muscles, as they exist right now, are made of fibers. Your maximum strength can only be accessed if you’re recruiting ALL of those fibers. Your body is one efficient masterpiece. If you are picking up a 5# weight and you’re used to picking up 100# weights do you think your body will be using ALL of the fibers it has access to? Definitely not. That would be an enormous waste of energy. Not useful as an evolutionary trait. What the body needs is a reason to fire all those fibers.
Yes, theoretically, the easiest way is to simply lift more weight and “force” the body to respond to a stimulus to activate all the fibers that comprise it. However, this runs into a HUGE problem when you start to use compound or functional movements. While wildly beneficial (and I highly recommend doing them) those types of movements require many different muscles to turn on and fire in a very specific sequence. Each muscle in these movements serves a unique purpose that cannot be replicated by another muscle. That’s why true strength is so difficult to achieve (now you can queue your visual of Arnold). Professionals spend years honing specific movement patterns then building very specific strength of each muscle involved to maximally complete something specific. That’s why the best baseball players, swimmers, and weight lifters all look very different. Their muscles are highly trained in different ways.
Let's leave the specificity discussion for another time. How does this relate to focus and your current workouts? Good question. I like to define “Focus” as the removal of all other distractions. Think back to anything you’ve ever felt proud of doing well. What were the circumstances around that? Do you remember thinking about your next meal? Do you remember thinking about your girlfriend, boyfriend, children, spouse? Do you remember thinking about what you were wearing? I’m willing to bet the answer is a unanimous no. You were only focused on the one thing you set out to do. The best part of the human body is also the worst; it will only adapt to the forces you expose it to. If you are constantly distracted and putting in ½ effort your body will only adapt to what you accomplish at ½ effort. If you constantly expose it to focused, intentional effort guess what…that’s what it’s going to start adapting to! This does NOT mean more weights every time. The reason multiple professions are built around exercise and its the subject of hundreds of thousands of research studies is that it’s more complicated than that.
My take-away point today is to do a quick check of “how” you’re working out first before diving into “what” you are doing for a workout. The best designed workout in the world won’t help if you aren’t giving it your full attention!
