You’re probably working hard enough.
I dont like to speak in absolutes, and there are certainly cases out there where the missing piece of the puzzle is just hard work. Prioritization in many cases is something that needs to be more honestly assessed, and much of the time our growth in one area depends upon how big of a priority it is for us. However this excerpt today is meant to address what I believe is a rather large amount of the population that actually is working hard enough, but are frustrated by their body not changing the way they feel it should in proportion to the work they put in. As a coach, I more often find I am telling people that they are trying to do too much as opposed to them needing to do more. If there is some sort of hypothetical “threshold” of work that needs to be met in order to make progress, I see often that the total amount of work is not the issue, its the inefficiency and misapplication of that work.
There are a lot of ways to look at this, but one of the “simpler” ways to make sure our work is most efficient comes from what biomechanics can tell us in regards to training. It’s worth noting that much of what I’m going to say is true in several contexts, but will be most relevant if we are assuming that our goal in general is to build muscle (and get a little stronger along the way.) This is important as the logic we are applying would change in several sport specific contexts as well as high level strength acquisition (at some point the training for muscle growth and pure strength gain will diverge.) Most of us may have several types of goals, but to some extent just about every single one of us I’d wager would like to see a little more quality muscle in one body part or another.
What biomechanics and an understanding of how anatomy works can tell us is which exercises will most efficiently let you train any given muscle. We know what direction the fibers of each muscle run, we know which muscles cause which motions at which joint, and we know the positions our bodies and limbs should be oriented in to accomplish these. That being said, choosing the right exercise means that we are training what we think we are training. These small details are often why people dont seem to notice muscle building in the areas they think they should be, or why we dont “feel” a certain body part during a movement that we should.
This concept is often why some don’t feel a lot of chest engagement when doing barbell bench press. In this example the hands must be probated (turned over) due to the bar itself. This forces our other joints in the arm to follow accordingly. A quick google search will show you that those fibers don’t run horizontally, and the bulk of the are more diagonal.
This means that it becomes increasingly hard to stretch those fibers under load with the fixed orientation of the bar. It doesn’t mean it wont use your chest at all, it means it’s not the most efficient way to grow bigger pecs. A more neutral grip (hands facing each other) with some slight rotation inward of the hands using dumbbells instead would allow you to move your arms (and therefore the weights) at an angle that lines up with these diagonally oriented fibers. I enjoy barbell bench pressing and it’s more than ok to do, but if the main goal is to work the chest as efficiently as we can, we can find better options.
We do however need to be careful with becoming fixated on “feeling” a muscle during a movement. Feeling it is in itself an important skill to have and good for many things outside of training as well as in it, but the beauty of good biomechanical set ups means that whether or not we feel something, if we are set up in the correct position and executing the correct movement we have no choice but to be using the muscle in question. Feeling a muscle can be very helpful and used advantageously, but it’s not always a sure fire way to know that we are training a specific muscle efficiently. I see this happen much with glute movements. We may stumble into a movement that gives us a great burn in our glute, but is it really the glute? The glute is our main hip extensor, meaning it’s the muscle most responsible for extending our hip. If you were standing straight up, flexing your hip would be bringing your knee to your chest. Extending your hip means you’re pushing your leg back the other direction.
This tells us that for the gluteus Maximus (biggest butt muscle), we train it by going into flexion and then extending the hip. Often times we feel the burn doing other movements in other directions, but the anatomy doesn’t lie.
Does this mean that everyone needs to go study biomechanics? Of course not. But this is one facet of intelligently designed programming when we are looking for ways to be as efficient as possible for training. Most of us are short on time, willing to do the work, but unsure what to do. This is the value of programming.
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