How to become stronger and build muscle faster ?

Where better to pay attention – to your feelings or to what you are working with?

You can walk up to the bar laughing at a joke, and during the bench press, remember a recent fight. Many people do this. But you must concentrate on the movements if you want to practice and see real progress.

What can you focus on while exercising?

As you move, you can look inward or outward.

1. Inner focus. It covers the sensations of one’s body: muscle tension, control over the position of the limbs, and breathing. If a trainer tells you to “Brace your glutes,” “Knees out to the side,” or “Puff out your belly,” he is shifting your focus inward.

2. External concentration. In this case, your thoughts, on the contrary, are directed to the objects that surround you: free weights, floors, walls, and imaginary objects. It is important here that you should focus on something other than these things in themselves, the result of the movement, or the task that needs to be completed.

To shift your attention outward, recommendations like “Push the floor with your feet,” “Imagine that oranges are squeezed under your arms,” and “The barbell should go straight up in a vertical line” will do.

The type of concentration should depend on your athletic goals. We will go through them one by one and make recommendations.

Why Focus on External Objects

Our consciousness is a fickle thing. When you think about your muscles and try to control them, you prevent the body from doing its job.

If you’re concentrating on an external task, like “lifting the dumbbell to face level,” the body automatically tenses the biceps brachii, the muscle it needs to do (the agonist). At the same time, the triceps, the extensor muscle of the elbow joint (the antagonist), relaxes so as not to interfere with the biceps.

But if your task is not to “lift the dumbbell” but to “strain the biceps,” the triceps will no longer relax as effectively. Muscular coordination suffers from this and performance.

In addition, mind control forces you to tighten many more fibers than you need to move. You expend more energy and get tired faster. Therefore, for most sports purposes, the external focus is suitable – when you concentrate on the task and allow the body to do its job.

Concentration on the result increases the strength, range of jumps, and running speed in a short distance, helping to do more repetitions to muscle failure in a set with heavy weight.

By shifting your focus outward, you will increase the economy of your running and strength training—be able to do the same work with less effort, and improve your performance in any sport requiring agility, precision, balance, endurance, and power. Also, external concentration helps to learn movements faster. Therefore it is often used in coaching.

Directing attention to the muscles only gets in the way, and for progress, one must focus exclusively on external objects. But there is still one reason to shift the focus periodically.

Why focus on your body

In bodybuilding, they practice strengthening the mind-muscle connection (mind-muscle connection) when you consciously strain what you want to pump during the exercise. And it helps.

To understand how this works, we need to remember the mechanism of hypertrophy. Fibers receive a signal to grow when they experience mechanical stress and fatigue.

The more fibers that work and fatigue, the more protein synthesis will be after training and the fatter the muscle will become.

As mentioned above, the body tenses only what is needed during external concentration. And if you connect the consciousness, the tension increases: agonists and antagonists work during the exercises. This reduces efficiency, but it increases the overall activation of the muscle and makes it tired.

Moreover, even those areas not usually used will be included in the work. The same muscle is made up of different types of fibers. Different motor neurons even innervate them, so not the entire muscle works in one exercise, but only those regions ideally suited for this task. They receive an incentive to grow, and they also increase in size.

Conscious control helps recruit other muscle fibers that are ineffective for this movement. In the end, you will not increase the working weights but will provide an incentive to grow more fibers.

This is true when working with small loads – up to 60% of the limit you can lift simultaneously. Approximately such weights are chosen by bodybuilders, working 12-14 times per approach.

Focusing on your body will build muscle almost twice as fast as if you shift your focus to external objects.

However, in bodybuilding, you should only sometimes focus on your body. An internal focus can prevent you from adding weight when needed or getting more reps in a set to muscle failure.

What to choose for you

It would help if you chose a concentration mode, focusing on your goals:

• Keep your attention on external objects to increase the economy of movement and performance in any sport.
• Combine external and internal focuses for maximum muscle building. Turn on external focus when you increase weights or perform a set to muscle failure, and in other cases, direct attention inward.