Feel the muscle, not the weight

Guys this was posted by Mark McManus via his website and is worthy of a read

http://www.musclehack.com/feel-the-muscle-not-the-weight/

The title of this article itself is great advice. It’s probably the one thing that most lifters forget, which results in a loss of meaningful progress.

Listen…this is bodybuilding. The clue is in the name – to build the body. If you want your muscles to get bigger, they need to be trained in a very specific way.

Some people can make some size gains with “strength training”, crossfit, olympic weight lifting, and so on, but those modes of training are not hypertrophy-specific.

Ask yourself what your goal in this game is. If it’s size gains, if it’s aesthetics, read this…it’s important.

We talk about “lifting”. We call ourselves “weight lifters”. But really our goal is “muscle stimulation”.

Stimulating a muscle to grow is all about “HIGH QUALITY MUSCULAR CONTRACTIONS”. You hear that? I hope you are really getting this.

When you train, are you “moving weight” or “feeling the muscle”? It makes all the difference in the world, my friend. You must…

FEEL THE MUSCLE, NOT THE WEIGHT

You can FORCE a muscle to grow. In fact, that’s the ONLY way to make it grow – to give it no choice!

If person A is dumbbell curling 30kg and making a mess of it because it’s too heavy for him, he will stimulate ZERO growth. His ego might be inflated, but his muscles won’t be.

If he dropped the weight to 20kg and did proper full range, constant tension, slow negative reps, he’d start to grow again. Without exaggeration, he would probably double his gains (if not more).

MESSAGE: Leave your damn ego at the gym door!

It’s not about what other people are lifting. It has NOTHING to do with that. Your body is your body.

The numbers only matter relative to YOU. If you could only bench 60kg, but that is with 10 high-quality reps, great! You then seek to make progress from there. Stop looking at the guys benching over 100kg: heck they might even have flat pecs!

Knock out really high quality sets and consider the numbers as secondary.

Kai Greene

“Your primary goal is not to lift weights, you’re not a weight lifter. I’ll never be a weight lifter…for the people out there who don’t know the difference, a bodybuilder is primarily concerned with contracting his muscles. He contracts his muscles against greater and greater resistance [over time] and by doing that he is able stimulate hypertrophy [growth]. A ‘weight lifter’ is just concerned about moving weight so he can boast to you about how much he curls, how much he benches…”