What to think about in training to get stronger and build muscle faster

What to focus on during exercise

While driving, you can turn your gaze inward or outward.

1. Internal focus. Covers the sensations of one's own body: muscle tension, control over the position of the limbs, breathing. If the coach tells you, "Tighten your glutes," "Spread your knees to the sides," or "Puff up your belly," he shifts your focus inward.

2. External concentration. In this case, your thoughts, on the contrary, are directed to the objects that surround you: free weights, floor, walls, imaginary objects. The important thing here is that you should not focus on these things in themselves, but on the result of the movement or on the task that needs to be completed.

To shift attention outward, recommendations like "Push the floor with your feet", "Imagine that there are oranges under the armpits", "The bar should run in a vertical line straight up."

The type of concentration should depend on your athletic goals. We will analyze them one by one and give recommendations.

Why Concentrate on External Objects

Our consciousness is a clumsy thing. When you think about your muscles and try to control them, you interfere with your body doing its job.

If you are concentrating on an external task, such as "lifting a dumbbell to face level," the body automatically tenses the biceps of the shoulder - the muscle that is needed for this (agonist). At the same time, the triceps, the muscle that extends the elbow joint (antagonist), relaxes so as not to interfere with the biceps.

But if your task is not to "lift the dumbbell", but to "tighten the biceps", the triceps will no longer relax so effectively. Muscle coordination suffers from this, and with it, performance.

In addition, mind control forces you to strain many more fibers than you need to move. You spend more energy and get tired faster. Therefore, for most athletic goals, it is the outer focus that suits - when you concentrate on the task and allow the body to act as it should.

Concentrating on results increases strength, jumping distance and running speed at short distances, and helps to do more reps to muscle failure in a heavy set.

By shifting your focus outward, you will be more economical in running and strength training - you can do the same work with less effort, and improve your performance in any sport that requires agility, precision, good balance, endurance, and power. Also, external concentration helps to learn movements faster, therefore it is often used in coaching work.

It seems that focusing on the muscles only interferes and for progress you need to focus exclusively on external objects. But there is still one reason to periodically shift focus.

Why focus on your body

In bodybuilding, the practice of strengthening the mind-muscle connection is when during exercise you deliberately strain what you want to pump. And it really helps.

To understand how this works, you need to remember the mechanism of hypertrophy. Fibers receive a signal to grow when they experience mechanical stress and fatigue.

The more fibers work and fatigue, the more protein synthesis there will be after training and the thicker the muscle will become.

As mentioned above, during external concentration, the body strains only what is needed. And if consciousness is connected, the tension increases: both agonists and antagonists work during exercise. This reduces efficiency, but increases overall muscle activation and fatigue.

Moreover, even those areas that are usually not used will be included in the work. The same muscle is made up of different types of fibers. They are even innervated by different motoneurons, so in one exercise not the whole muscle works, but only those regions of it that are ideal for this task. They receive an incentive to grow, and they also increase in size.

Conscious control helps to engage other muscle fibers that are not effective for this movement. As a result, you will not increase your working weights, but you will provide an incentive to grow more fibers.

This is true when working with light loads - up to 60% of the limit that you can lift in one go. Approximately such weights are chosen by bodybuilders, working 12-14 times per set.

By concentrating on your body, you will build muscle mass almost twice as fast as shifting the focus to external objects.

However, in bodybuilding, you should not focus on your body all the time. Internal focus can prevent you from adding weight when needed, or doing more reps on a set to muscle failure.

What should you choose

You need to choose a concentration mode, focusing on your goals:

Pay attention to external objects to maximize efficiency of movement and performance in any sport.
Combine external and internal focuses for maximum muscle building. Include external concentration when you increase weights or perform a set to muscle failure, and in other cases, direct your attention inward.