Brain Training
What is your physical fitness goal? Lose weight, add muscle, get more toned; the different goals and reasons go on and on. Luckily, for all of these goals, the best first step remains the same. And what is that first step that will help facilitate everything else in the progress towards your chosen goal?
You need to train your brain!
Why do I need to train my brain?
Muscles are what move our bodies. But something has to direct the action of these muscles. That something is our brain and central nervous system. However, in most people who haven’t been regularly training, the brain is rather inefficient at regulating these muscle actions.
By purposefully exercising in ways to increase the ability and efficiency in which the brain directs the control of muscles we can make all subsequent exercise more efficient, more likely to achieve the goals we’re attempting to target, and overall see the following benefits:
· Increased body coordination and balance
· Increased strength
· Better posture
· Increased resiliency to injury
These are just a few of the benefits that come from brain exercise training. But why does this happen?
How does training the brain make exercising better?
As mentioned previously, the brain is what sends signals to your muscles to create body movement. For example, if you wanted to perform a biceps curl exercise, your brain would signal the biceps muscle to contract and the contraction of that muscle would move your arm in the familiar biceps curl motion.
But the brain does not tell the entire biceps muscle to contract. In people not used to regular exercise, the brain simply doesn’t know how – because it hasn’t practiced – to signal the biceps muscle to fully contract right away. By purposefully training in a way to strengthen this connection between brain and muscle, our body does learn to more efficiently and completely recruit the use of the intended muscle(s). In fact, the strength increases most people see when beginning an exercise program are due to this increased connection between the brain and the muscles, not a result of actual muscle growth itself.
Growing muscle requires stimulation of the muscle. If our brain cannot recruit a large part of a muscle with the exercise we do, that unused portion of the muscle doesn’t receive a stimulus and therefore has no reason to grow.
Being able to coordinate our bodies for better movement, balance, and injury resistance from these movements requires that our brain is able to direct the full movement of the correct muscles at the correct times. With a weakened or untrained brain-muscle connection, this is more difficult.
At the end of the day, if we can strengthen our brain’s ability to fully use the right muscles at the right time we can then exercise in a way that will allow, among other things:
· More efficient muscle growth
· A better ability to tone existing muscle
· Training conducive to fat loss and/or body recomposition
· An ability to move in everyday life in a safer manner
But this begs the question – how do I strengthen my brain-muscle connection?
How do I exercise the brain-muscle connection?
The best way to train your brain to be better able to control muscles is to place it in situations demanding that the brain be able to utilize as much of the full muscle as possible as quickly as possible. This can be accomplished with high weight loads for minimal repetitions during an exercise set. Performing an exercise (while still maintaining good form) with a weight that only allows 3-5 repetitions is a great way to achieve this effect. This type of training is typically best used for large compound movement exercises such as squats, deadlifts, bench presses, rowing movements, etc.
This does not mean that other weight loads and repetition ranges should be avoided. But all too often, it is this 3-5 repetition training range that people avoid. Unfortunately, this leaves the important brain training behind. This is where a well-developed overall training plan comes into play. To strengthen the brain-muscle connections, utilize heavy, low-repetition sets as a part of your complete training plan. Ideally, these heavy sets should come near the beginning of your exercise session before you become fatigued from other work. As an added benefit, the brain and nervous system boost these sets provide will likely enhance your abilities in later portions of your training session as well!