Fadi
...
Since 2009, I’ve written many words on this forum;however one aspect of training I’ve always emphasised was and still is the psychology of training. I believe not enough thought is given to this essential element of our training, the thought of how we ought to approach our training.
If your goal it to make the weight go up instead of effectively working your muscles, then by all means focus on loading that bar and going for it. However if you think of training as something you do to your muscles with the weight, instead of something you do to the weight with your muscles, then (and only then), you would go far on your way to building some serious muscle.
Perhaps some are not convinced of what I’ve just written above, arguing (maybe) that moving heavy weights or using a certain amount of repetitions is vital to ensuring muscle growth. Again here we see the focus has been shifted onto the load and volume instead of applied effort by the muscles themselves. Let me see if I can illustrate my point for you further.
If you were to take a weight and begin to do a barbell curl with it, only to stop at the midway range position, where the tension on the biceps is at its maximum capacity, here you’d find that the bar is mechanically moving neither up or down, but has rather been held statically by the effort your biceps are applying onto that weight, preventing it from being pulled down by gravity. As time ticks away and the seconds increase in their count, you’d find that even though the weight on that bar has not increased, your effort in maintaining it in a motionless state has increased, causing metabolic stress and other factors that go to enhance your muscular development.
No, the above was not some prescription to a new way of working out (even though static holds as such do have their place in bodybuilding), however the sole purpose of my example was to simply illustrate to you that our main objective here is not how many repetitions you perform, but rather how you perform each of your repetition.
Thank you for reading.
If your goal it to make the weight go up instead of effectively working your muscles, then by all means focus on loading that bar and going for it. However if you think of training as something you do to your muscles with the weight, instead of something you do to the weight with your muscles, then (and only then), you would go far on your way to building some serious muscle.
Perhaps some are not convinced of what I’ve just written above, arguing (maybe) that moving heavy weights or using a certain amount of repetitions is vital to ensuring muscle growth. Again here we see the focus has been shifted onto the load and volume instead of applied effort by the muscles themselves. Let me see if I can illustrate my point for you further.
If you were to take a weight and begin to do a barbell curl with it, only to stop at the midway range position, where the tension on the biceps is at its maximum capacity, here you’d find that the bar is mechanically moving neither up or down, but has rather been held statically by the effort your biceps are applying onto that weight, preventing it from being pulled down by gravity. As time ticks away and the seconds increase in their count, you’d find that even though the weight on that bar has not increased, your effort in maintaining it in a motionless state has increased, causing metabolic stress and other factors that go to enhance your muscular development.
No, the above was not some prescription to a new way of working out (even though static holds as such do have their place in bodybuilding), however the sole purpose of my example was to simply illustrate to you that our main objective here is not how many repetitions you perform, but rather how you perform each of your repetition.
Thank you for reading.
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