By Alexa Tucker, Self
You know the phrase "mind over matter?" Turns out, it can apply to your workouts,
too. One of the buzziest theories in fitness right now is something
often referred to as the mind-muscle connection, and the basic idea is
that just by thinking about your muscles moving your body through an
exercise, you can help them work more efficiently.
[post_ads]Pretty much any trainer will tell you there are big benefits to be found in mentally connecting to your movement,
simple as it may sound. "It can be very easy to disassociate from your
workout by chatting with your friends or paying more attention to the
instructor. But what we've seen is that if you focus on contracting the
muscle that you're involving, then you can get a better result out of
it," exercise physiologist and ACE-certified personal trainer Pete
McCall, C.S.C.S., host of the All About Fitness podcast, tells SELF.
There
are a few different theories that suggest why brain power is such an
important tool in getting the most out of your time at the gym—and while
some are still under investigation, others make a convincing argument
for channeling the mind-muscle connection in your own workouts.
First, it's worth noting that neurological evidence shows that our brains play a major role in regulating muscle movement and strength.
"Muscles
are a puppet of the nervous system, and a muscle that does not have
nerves regulating it is essentially useless in terms of force
production," Brian Clark, Ph.D., executive director of the Ohio
Musculoskeletal and Neurological Institute and professor of physiology
and neuroscience at Ohio University, tells SELF.
This
means that muscle movement begins in the brain, and it plays a major
role in regulating strength—remarkably, the brain can regulate strength
without you ever moving a muscle. Clark co-authored a 2014 study
that found that participants with one arm immobilized in a cast could
avoid loss of wrist strength simply by using imagery, thinking through
the process of flexing their wrist.
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Here's how the connection works: "Whether you're actually doing a
task or just imagining a task, if you're imagining it correctly, you see
increases in the EEG signal, which suggests that the neurons are being
activated," says Clark.
This neurological signal is then sent down
from the brain to the muscle you’re thinking about. The theory is that
if you visualize an exercise and specific muscle movement as you do it,
you can train the brain to send stronger signals, which translates to
more muscle engagement, likely by either recruiting more muscle fibers
or getting the fibers to work quicker and more efficiently, he says.
The jury's still out on whether mentally moving through an exercise while you do it improves muscle recruitment on its own, but early research is promising.
Of course, as with all things that sound too good to be true, there's a kicker—you'll see bigger strength benefits
actually working out than just thinking it through, stresses Clark (so
you definitely shouldn't give up that gym membership if you're
physically able to exercise).
But these findings give us a clue
into how the mind drives movement, and new research is exploring the
question of how thinking about your workout while you're doing it can
give you better results than just mindlessly performing the exercise
alone.
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Clark points to a few recent studies from other researchers exploring how mental effort affects workouts, including one published in June 2017.
In it, 18 young, healthy participants were put in a low-intensity
strength training program for six weeks and divided into a high mental
effort group, a low mental effort group, and a control group that didn't
exercise. The participants in the high mental effort group gained more
strength than the other groups, even though the workout intensity was
the same for both the high mental effort and low mental effort groups.
While
promising results like these are buzzy among fitness pros who've been
advocating for the mind-muscle connection for years, these are early,
small-scale studies (the study above also didn't test imagery directly),
so it's hard to say whether thinking about your muscles working
actually leads to better performance, independent of other factors.
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