One of the things that’s been going really well with my working out is that I’ve been focusing extra hard. It leads to much more effective workouts. This is related to the mind muscle connection I have talked about so many times.
It all started when I began working out with Michal more often. I noticed that he would really be feeling a lot of pain on exercises where I wasn’t. He’d be more pumped and tired after our workouts than I was. I thought maybe this was because his muscles are so much bigger. But then a few things came together to make me realize he was just doing it better, and in a way that you can’t fully train someone to do.
My turning point on what to do next occurred when we were doing tricep cable pushdowns and Michal told me to hold it at the bottom and flex to really feel the tricep. When I did this it would result in an immediate and severe burning senstation. What was interesting about this is that it would only happen if I chose to do it. It wasn’t built in to the actual movement. If I chose to do it, it would make the tricep workout so much more intense and I’d really feel it afterward.
I started expanding this concept to every workout. It’s not the same for each exercise, but at my current level of experience I can much better tell where the key flexing points are and how to really exhaust the different muscles.
You don’t increase the weight at all and yet you get a much better workout. I think it might even be the only way to get that good of a workout. It would be counter productive to increase the weight because you have to be in control to have the concentration required. I think what happens to a lot of people who don’t have trainers is that they see these big guys groaning in pain and think, “I bet I’m supposed to make the weight heavy enough that it hurts me so much I need to groan.” This is exactly wrong, and is one of the contributing reasons people who don’t have a trainer end up leaving the gym injured never to return. On the other hand, you don’t want the weight too low or you might end up feeling a burn, but not really getting much out of it.
Experience is required, I think, to really fully grasp this concept. What’s fascinating to me is that you have to choose it. You have to choose to do your reps in such a way that is a number of times more painful than if you didn’t do it that way. Nobody watching will be able to tell the difference, only you. And it’s another reason I think having a bodybuilding trainer is so essential. Some trainers could have you doing the exact right movement, but you would eventually stop getting much out of it.
Today we did leg extensions and for the first time I was able to apply this concept to that exercise. (You might say it was my first leg workout.) It was amazing. I used to feel sort of let down by a full hour of leg extensions, but not today. My legs were shaking, and the pain was present. I will admit that it got to be a bit much and on the last two sets I started off not focusing out of fear of the pain. But once I realized that nothing was really happening in my legs, I’d focus and at that point only had like two or three reps I could do with that intensity.