With the testing cycle going on, I thought it’d be a good time to talk about the idea of muscle recruitment.
What is that you ask? Well let me explain…
You see your brain is constantly getting feedback and making adjustments accordingly based off of that feedback. If you’re about to do a task like say pick up a pencil the brain uses past experience, feedback on the size of the pencil etc, to decide how much muscle it wants to use to pick up that pencil. The brain telling the specific muscles to work is called recruitment. It ‘recruits’ enough muscle to accomplish the task.
The brain also wants everything to be super efficient, so it’s only going to use exactly enough muscle it thinks it needs to accomplish a task. For example, if the pencil looked like a normal pencil and you went to pick it up and instead of wood it was made out of lead, it’d surprise you and you’d have to adjust to lift it. The brain only recruited enough muscle it needed to accomplish the task of picking up a weight it was familiar with.
Same thing is true in the opposite direction. Say for example you go to a restaurant and they set down a mug of water on the table. Your brain looks at it and knows it’s a glass mug so it expects it to be a certain weight, then when you pick it up it’s actually plastic and you pick it up way too fast and spill it. Your brain recruited more muscle then it needed to pick up the glass.
Why does this matter to you?
Well we’re lifting heavy weight this week trying to hit a personal record. Your goal is to get the brain to recruit every muscle fiber you have to accomplish that task, that way you can lift the most weight.
How do you do this? By steadily increasing the load. If you loaded your max weight on the bar and tried it on your first set, your body wouldn’t be prepared. You don’t have a reference point for your brain to base off of in order to recruit muscle, so you’ll fail.
What you have to do, is steadily increase the load. The brain will make judgements based off of what you last did, and then will know that you’re adding weight, so more muscle is required. When you do this correctly, you’ll be able to steadily recruit more muscle fibers until you’re using every fiber that you have. When you do that, then you’ll know you truly have a max lift, and that’s when adaptation will occur.
One last thing, the brain also listens to self talk. So if you tell yourself it’s going to be heavy, or you don’t want to do it, then the brain will respond by not giving you as much muscle to push with. Much of recruitment is based on mental attitude as well.
Happy PR’ing this week!
August 4th, 2015
Strength:
BenchPress
Met Con:
2K row
1 Mile run
for time