Objective: Forging a better bond between though and muscular mobility. Trainers often repeat: Concentrate on the muscle you’re working the exercise. But is it just about the correct technique or rather about the ability to feel that muscle working?
The ‘pump’ feeling often leads us to assume we have had a successful training session. However, the activation of a selected muscle depends on the nervous system and our control over it. When we focus our thoughts on the muscles working at a given moment during the exercises, not only does nerve conduction occur more efficiently, but also new conduction pathways are built activated. This will cause more muscle fibers to contract within the muscle, increasing our ability to exert force. This is what it looks like in a nutshell. There is no denying the benefits of this enhanced muscular feeling, you need to concentrate on the exercises you do to achieve better results.
Five steps towards proper concentration
First
Focus on the training. Shopping, cooking dinner, overdue work or a difficult conversation awaiting us will all have their due time AFTER TRAINING. Don’t think about them, don't give them the mental space. Focus on the exercises performed, and the muscles you are using.
Secondly
Use physiological breaks. This term may sound a bit strange, but it is perfectly often used by coaches and professional trainers. A break between sets or exercises is a pause needed by our body to calm down; a short rest, a sip of water deep breaths, whatever works best for you. This is not the time to look at your phone, reply to text messages, talk to other people, this is a time to focus. Of course, the gym can be a social place, but breaks in training must not break your rhythm and cause you to lose concentration on the exercise.
Thirdly
Watch yourself when you exercise. Mirrors in the gym are not only used to admire your gains, above all - similar to the training rooms for dancers – it is a way to better observe and therefore control movement while exercising. If your home / garage gym does not have a mirror, get one.
Fourthly
If you are easily distracted in the gym, practice with headphones. Properly arranged music mix will allow you to maintain the right pace of training and focus on the task you have to perform. Music also allows you to isolate yourself from the environment during breaks between exercises and thus not lose focus.
Fifth
And this is perhaps the most important piece of advice; think about the muscles that are doing the exercises right now. When you exercise focus specifically on the muscle you are working the hardest. This is more difficult in compound exercises like deadlift, squats, and overhead press, but properly performed strength training requires constant concentration of thoughts on the muscles that are performed by the exercise to forge this connection.
How to improve muscle co-ordination by doing multi-joint exercises?
Concentrating on a given muscle when performing a single-joint exercise, such as curling the forearms with a load, is not difficult. We observe and feel the tension of the biceps, we control it throughout the movement up to the peak moment of contraction and then in the slow eccentric phase. It's harder when we do squats, deadlifts, and other exercises that involve multiple muscle groups.
In this case, a good method is to focus on the correct posture - stable feet position, tense deep muscles that support our spine during the exercise, and a properly raised head. Find a point on the opposite wall that you will be looking at throughout the exercise. When we start doing an exercise, think about which muscles are activated in turn, which muscle groups are “taking the weight” at any given moment. Let us try to help in this work with our concentration. We will quickly find out that focusing on the muscles allows not only for a better technique of the exercise, but also for helps us with our progressive overload.