You’ve probably heard that when you exercise you should feel a certain muscle working. Your biceps should burn a little when you’re doing bicep curls, your quads should burn a little when you’re doing squats, and so on. But this is not a strict rule. Sometimes you can get a perfectly effective workout without feeling any specific muscles.
So why do so many people tell you to focus on feeling the muscles work? Partly because it can be a useful teaching tool to make sure you’re doing the exercises correctly – but this is only true for Some? Exercise. And honestly, another big reason is the influence of bodybuilding language and techniques on gym culture in general. Bodybuilders training for the stage work with a piecemeal mentality: Make sure you’re doing the work it muscle and no He One. That’s fine if you’re trying to tone down your body after years of training, but building muscle in the first place doesn’t require that approach. So here’s what you need to know.
You may not always feel a muscle, even if it is working.
The most important thing to know here is this: You don’t need to feel the muscles for them to work. Let’s say you’re doing a barbell squat. A squat works your quads, your glutes, and many other muscles besides. You can’t feel every single one of them because when you’re doing heavy squats, your brain is processing Very Of information. It’s like feeling the weight of the bar on your back. This is to remember the technique signals you are trying to focus on. It pays attention to your balance as you descend to make sure you don’t lean one way or the other. This is counting the number of reps in your mind. Maybe sometimes a muscle manages to say “Hey, I’m your quads and I’m hurting right now.” But your brain doesn’t have time to listen to every muscle chatter, just like a mom making dinner doesn’t have time to listen to every sound her baby makes. Your brain is focused on the task at hand: making sure you complete the rep.
I like to think of some muscles as being “stronger” than others. If I’m doing kettlebell swings, I can focus more on the fact that my forearms are burning (from holding the kettlebell) and I don’t feel at all that my glutes are working. But after 100 swings, oh boy, you can bet my butt will feel like jelly after that. It didn’t irritate me that much I am waiting for your reply.
When it matters whether you feel jealous or not and when it doesn’t
So what should you do if you don’t feel your muscles working? you look for another way to be Sure The muscle is working. In the case of the yogic exercises mentioned above, the fact that you have completed the exercise is all the information you need. Your lats are used in your pullups. Your kettlebell swing and your squats use your glutes. There is no way to avoid this.
Does it ever matter whether you feel the muscles? yes, if you are then it may help Solitude Exercise. In these exercises, like bicep curls or leg extensions, you are trying to focus an activity on one muscle or a small muscle group. You are “isolating” that muscle. Your brain is a little more able to focus on the sensation of that one muscle, And Isolation is a type of exercise where it is possible to perform the same movement without working the target muscle.
For example, let’s say you are side leg lifts up To work your hip adductors, especially the gluteus medius. If your hips are bent or your legs are slightly pointed forward, you can feel the muscles at the front of your hips working. But if you do the same exercise with your back against the wall, sliding your heel along the wall as you lift your leg, you’ll feel it much more in the glute you’re trying to isolate.
What do you think so far?
As a general rule, for compound exercises (where multiple muscles are working together), it doesn’t matter whether you feel the muscles or not. But if you’re doing an isolation exercise, feeling the muscle is helpful feedback to make sure you’re isolating the right muscle.
Don’t lose weight just to feel the muscles work
There’s a lot of bad advice out there, and I’d like to point out one thing in particular: the advice to reduce the weight you’re lifting so you can feel the muscles better. Sometimes people will say that it is important to make the “mind-muscle connection.”
But you don’t have to drop weight on the bar to make that connection. If you want to spend more time feeling the muscles, work some isolation work into your warmup. (these are Sometimes called “activation” exercises.) You can also do additional isolation work at the end of your workout to give those specific muscles a little more volume.
It’s important to remember that different parts of your workout have different purposes. If you’re squatting with heavy weights, you need to put some weight on the bar To continue developing your strength and sitting skills. Often the lifts that make it hardest to feel a muscle are the lifts where that muscle is doing the most work! So don’t skip heavy, effective lifts just because you don’t “feel” them as well as the isolations or warmups.
