Muscle Building Weapon: Your Brain

It's hilarious to see how everyone, when engaging in a muscle building workout, gets so caught up in putting on the right equipment, such as wrist or knee straps, a waist belt, hand hooks, etc., or they spend a ton of time writing away on their training log, yet when they actually go to perform the exercise set and movement, they are thinking about everything except the actual muscle itself.

Stop concentrating so much on how much weight is on the bar, or looking around at every person that walks by your bench or machine. Forget about only focusing on trying to get a "certain number of reps". The first and most important thing you need to have your mind on when performing an exercise is the muscle itself that is doing the work. If muscle building is your main goal, then making sure you are mentally locked into that muscle is extremely crucial.

Who cares how much or how many times you lifted a particular weight if the intended muscle you are trying to develop wasn't taxed. Case in point: researchers from Hull University (which is located in the United Kingdom) had 30 individuals do biceps curls while either focusing on the biceps and the act of performing curls or focusing on just moving the weight up and down.

Well, as would be expected, those that actually focused mentally on the biceps muscle while doing the curls measured much more muscle activity within the fibers than the group that was only worried about "curling the weight".

Now, over the course of weeks and months, who do you think is going to build bigger biceps muscles between those two groups? Obviously, the ones that have greater activity within that body part because of mentally focusing on it.

Some experts call this internal clues that the body is giving you. That should be more important in your workout programs.....focus on what's going on inside of the muscle instead of what's going on outside of the muscle for greater muscle building.