Thread: The Mind-Muscle Connection

Smart Training: Retrain your brain to produce your best muscle gains ever.


Originally featured in:
Men's Fitness October, 2001

The Mind-Muscle Connection

Do you ever just go through the motions? You know, sleepwalk through a workout just for the sake of getting it done, absentmindedly pumping out your biceps curls while thinking about your ailing 401K, the latest celebrity murder trial or the unalterable futility of existence. If it’s the latter, first take meds, then keep reading.

You can develop great mind-muscle control by moving very slowly throughout both phases of a repetition while focusing on the contraction in your working muscles.

If you regularly trade in your brain for a complimentary towel when you walk into the gym, or if you’ve never learned how to focus on the working muscle, you’re missing out on perhaps the biggest secret to building your body: the mind-muscle connection. Simply put, you need to engage your gray matter while you engage the iron. Let your mind wander, like a punch line in search of a joke, and you won’t find much humor in the results.

To drive this point home, we decided we couldn’t rely on just some book-schooled Ph.D. or exercise physiologist. No, we needed someone who knows what we’re talking about firsthand. Enter Milos Sarcev, pro bodybuilder and personal trainer from Temecula, Calif. While Sarcev’s personal experience with honing the mind-muscle link comes from building a massive and striated physique straight out of a Duke Nukem video game, his advice rings true for anyone trying to add some quality size.

[Note: Last month, the editor in chief weighed in on the mind-muscle connection in his Editor’s Letter by discussing a mind-muscle strategy from Milos’ training archive. This section builds on that earlier presentation.]


Enter the Zone
If you’ve ever rained shots down during a pickup basketball game with a seemingly can’t-miss, magical touch, you know the zone. Failing that, you’ve at least seen Kobe Bryant or Allen Iverson enter it on occasion. It’s a feeling of automatic pilot that is similar to the mind-muscle link in weight training. If you train correctly, you fall into a virtual trancelike state, wherein your breathing pattern and lifting speed blend into a cadence, while in your mind you see the proper muscles firing on each perfectly controlled rep.

As a beginner, Sarcev admits he knew nothing about the mental aspects of lifting. “When I started training in 1980,” he says, “I’d look at the pictures in bodybuilding magazines and try to simulate the exercises. I didn’t pay attention to the feeling in the muscle until I ran into a 60-year-old gymnast who was training in my gym. He asked me, ‘Can you squeeze a muscle on command? If I ask you to squeeze your right outer triceps, for example, can you do it?’ What he was talking about was mind-muscle control. He was actually capable of isolating a muscle like the rear delt and squeezing it in isolation from the rest of his shoulder.”

According to Sarcev, the gymnast revealed a simple yet often overlooked tenet of getting results: Feel the body part you’re working by deliberately contracting it as you lift. For example, if you’re benching, visualize your pecs contracting as you raise the bar. This is where many lifters fall short, Sarcev explains, because they use whatever means necessary to lift a weight without concentrating on making the intended muscle do the work. “Building muscle is not about moving a weight from point A to point B. It’s about squeezing the muscle and exerting complete control over every inch of the movement.”


Slow Speed Ahead
To develop the “zone mentality” from the get-go, Sarcev suggests trying a technique he calls “super-slow reps”: Take a full five seconds to lower a weight and another full five seconds to lift it. “From the very first moment you pick up the weight, you need maximal tension in the muscle,” he says. “You can’t use momentum, and you can’t relax in the negative [lowering] phase of the exercise. With super-slow reps, you won’t be focused on the object you’re moving but on the muscle you’re working.”

Whether you’re just starting out or getting back into a program, or if your brain cells are on autopilot when you’re in the weight room, Sarcev suggests using super-slow reps for at least one to three months to develop a connection (see sidebar, left). “After that, you’ll be familiar with the feeling you should have in the muscle when working out. That way, when you don’t have that feeling, you’ll know to question what you’re doing wrong.”

To help you zone in on a powerful mind-muscle link, one that will benefit your workouts and augment your progress for years to come, we’ve included a sample routine so you can try out Sarcev’s super-slow reps for yourself.

While this regimen includes a suggested number of repetitions for each set, Sarcev cautions against allowing these guidelines to limit your workout. “I’ve seen people who fail mentally on every single set long before they fail physically, especially beginners who don’t know their limitations. They’ll say, ‘I’m going to do six repetitions,’ and I see them blaze through five and then struggle with six, because they’ve convinced themselves they can’t do another. You have to strive for physical failure instead of mental failure, concentrating on the action of the muscle.”

Sarcev adds that, no matter what program you do, lifting weights and using your head are not mutually exclusive activities. “Going in with an empty mind and just lifting weights is easy. But if you don’t have a strong mind-muscle link, you’re just wasting your time in the gym.”


I posted this because there was a thread asking about the "mind muscle connection".

I knew a powerlifter, and a HUGE bodybuilder, who both did rather slow reps. I am aware that more powerlifters probably use the slow reps, partially to avoid injury. Also one thing that comes to mind, is that fast twitch fibers are larger than slow twitch, which are endurance fibers, i.e. sprinters versus marathon runners.

But I always think back to Matt, who was not only huge, but totally ripped, and he looked at his body parts as he worked them slowly, with intent.