Strength Building: Practice the Invisible Skills

Realizing your full potential for lifting heavy weights or doing some other feat of strength is dependent on being able to mobilize your muscles to do a very difficult movement. The most important action in producing power occurs under the skin and out of sight!

There is no way to make a video of what is happening under your skin in your muscles, connective tissues, and nervous system. However, that is where the most important action is taking place when you perform power movements.

 

Get the technique right or flounder.

As most of you know, I constantly emphasize perfecting the technique for doing any heavy lift. This applies whether it is a competition lift or an exercise being done to build support strength.

Think of strength lifting as being exactly analogous to a golf swing. Power lifts and a golf swing are precision athletic movements that must be executed perfectly to get the optimal results.

If a golfer has a lousy swing and constantly changes what they do, the chances of ever shooting a good score are practically nil.

The same is true of a powerlifter or other recreational strength athlete who varies their technique unpredictably on multiple reps during a workout.

What happens under the skin when this lousy golfer takes a hack at the ball is a set of poorly scripted nerve signals to the muscles. His body sort of follows his conscious commands that result in him swinging the club.

If you watch the professionals who have managed to excel to the point where they get a PGA card, then what the observer sees is masterful swing. Both the visual of what you see when the pro swings and the nerve-muscle under the skin are drastically different from the sub-novice.

Many lifters have inconsistent or undependable technique, particularly as the weights get heavier.

Failing to deal with this issue means being mired in sub-optimal performance indefinitely.

How can we deal with this problem?

Unfortunately, the answer is both complex and difficult to correct. If solutions were easy, everyone would have corrected their flaws years ago.

 

 

Step 1: Get the Movement Correct

Practicing the lift with little or no weight is essential if one wants to perfect the precision movement needed for a serious heavy lift.

Typically each individual has one part of a lift where they have developed bad technique by regularly doing something wrong at one point or another.

The best cure for this problem is to practice with an empty bar (or a PVC pipe) to lock in the correct technique for the entire lift.

For example, if a lifter cannot regularly achieve proper depth in the squat with heavy weight they will tend to repeat this mistake regularly. One part of a solution is to practice the full lift correctly with an empty bar and gradually add weight while maintaining perfect form.

As most of you know, perfect form is not for style points is necessary to achieve maximum mechanical advantage AND do a competition legal lift.

One common problem with this approach is that most lifters can maintain perfect form while the weight is light. Once the weight passes a certain point, many will suddenly revert to their flawed technique.

Here is where extreme focus and concentration over many weeks of struggle can give good results.

If correcting flaws was easy, we all would have done it long ago.

 

Step 2: Perfect Technique and Whole Body Tension

The concept of whole-body tension (aka. Muscle recruitment) is central to mobilizing maximum force for heavy lifting.

Ensuring that you have maximal muscular tension throughout the lift requires regular practice where one assumes different positions in a lift and consciously creates tension in your entire body.

This is assuming a static pose of one part of the lift and consciously tensing every muscle in the body.

These are often very hard to change because repeated practice of relaxing at a certain point are part of the program in your central nervous system. Repeated practice of a mistake will perfect this error.

 

Correcting this can be done using static contractions at the position where the unwanted relaxation occurs.

If the problem developed over a long period of time, it may take weeks or months to correct.

Hang in there, the results will be gratifying even if they dont appear immediately.

 

Lift Big!

Richard