adminSiba Guzha
HELLO gentle readers. I hope I find you all well. The mind muscle connection is one of those things I wish I had known more about when I was younger. For years I ignored, and even fought against this idea thinking it was some trivial detail that only body-builders cared anything about. Now I consider the mind muscle connection one of the most important aspects of training.
The idea that mind and body are connected is sometimes a rather new concept. You often don’t hear much about joining the body and mind outside of disciplines like Yoga or martial arts. If anything, our western fitness culture is often filled with the idea that the mind is the home of evil and lazy thoughts that can potentially steer you down paths you don’t want to go. We often hear things like how we are our own worst enemy or that we have to get out of our own way in order to get results.
While there are some bad ideas and thoughts that can set you back, the idea of needing to fight the mind and keep it separate from the body is a very detrimental concept. You simply cannot achieve success without having a strong mindset which can then translate to better physical action. Not only are the body and mind connected, but in some circles they are even considered one and the same. Body is mind and mind is body.
You can see a good example of this through simple anatomy. The mind, or your brain, is connected to your spinal cord which then branches out into your peripheral nervous system through all of the nerves in your body. These nerves are then attached to your muscles which respond to the signals they receive directly from your brain. In light of this, we can see how muscle is always behaving in response to the instructions issued by the mind. If there is some sort of injury or disruption of the signal from the mind then the effects on the muscle are very much diminished. The muscle simply cannot function. Everything it does or doesn’t do depends on the instructions it receives from your mind.
Every form of training is about teaching your mind to operate your muscles. While we may think of exercise as a form of physical training, it’s actually a very mental discipline. It’s a mental practice to get the mind to use your muscles in a progressive and more productive-way. Training therefore is about training the mind to use the body.
So in the end, everything you want to accomplish in your training comes down to how you use your muscles and everything about using your muscles comes down to how your mind relates to and can use them. Muscle is really simple. It does whatever your mind tells it to do.
It’s training the mind that’s the hard part.
There is a simple trick I use before every exercise I do in the gym to improve the mind-muscle connection. The first thing to do is to get your body in the optimal position for that exercise. In the case of doing a push-up this would involve lying on the floor and placing your hands, elbows, shoulders, feet and head just where you want them to be. Once you’re in the perfect position, you tense up all of the muscles you want to engage in your push-up.
Siba Guzha is a fitness trainer and can be contacted on 0772 789 110 Tel: 020 64712 ext 216 or Email: [email protected].
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