How To Gain Muscles

Let me start with an example. When you burn your fingers, you feel the burn in your fingers. However, if you stop the nerves from sending the signals from your fingers to your brain, you will not feel the pain. Pain is really felt in the brain. This is true for most of our sensations.

A clear signal to and from your brain will increase or decrease the impact of your exercise. This is one reason that it takes a lot of repetitions to master a technique. Talent accounts for how fast or how slow you can master something. But it does not eliminate the need for repetition.

Repetition with correct form is essential in getting results from your exercise activities. Learning correct form however is not for the weekend warriors and casual fitness enthusiasts. This is the realm of true athletes.

If you want to have the body of an athlete, you need to act like an athlete. Master the correct form. Part of this mastery is clearing, priming and developing the pathways between your brain and your muscles. Some call this developing muscle memory. Since your brain works with images, the clearer the image, the easier for the brain to send the correct signal to your muscles. The result of a clear image is crisp movements.

Clear and crisp images have many parts. One part is defined edges. This is not the time for artistic blurs and softening filters. You need a crystal clear image with well defined edges of the exercise established in your brain.

What does this mean precisely?

You need to understand and control the beginning and ending of the movements related to each exercise, precisely. Your movements need to be crisp. Remember crisp is not fast. But we talk about that later. In a bench press, with your elbows directly underneath your hands, when the bar touches your chest, your elbows are slightly lower than your shoulder. This position activates your pecs. Your brain sends the signal to your pecs to get ready for the lift.

With a barbell, you cannot lower your hands anymore since the bar touches your chest. But with dumbbells you can go too low and transfer the load to your deltoids and over stretch your pecs. Your brain can actually send a signal to your pecs to relax which is the opposite of what you want.

At the top of the movement, as long as you keep your chest up and shoulder blades retracted, you will reach a full pec contraction when you straighten your elbows out. However, most people have a wobbly end in their bench press. They keep pressing the bar as far as they can by hollowing their chest and allowing the shoulder blades to separate. This wobbly end, not only reduces the pec contraction but also creates an instability and risks shoulder injury. The crisp end is when your elbow straightens but your shoulder blades remain back. When you follow this step, your bench press always end at the same spot.

Holding an image of a crisp beginning and ending in your mind will increase the impact of the exercise and the results you will get. It will increase your strength and it will reduce the chance of injury. What more can you ask for? Visit http://x5fitness.com for more details.