Mind–muscle connection revisited: do 100 studies about beanbag tossing, stick balancing, and dart throwing have any relevance for strength training?

Excerpt

We welcome the additional perspective of our original research raised by Halperin and Vigotsky, demonstrating that interpretation is in the eye of the beholder. Halperin and Vigotsky felt that our article lacked a discussion of the effects of such training on performance. The reason for not devoting a discussion on this topic in our article was very straightforward; this was not the purpose of the study nor was the study designed to do so. Our study evaluated whether focusing on using specific muscles—the triceps and pectoralis, respectively—during bench press from 20 to 80 % of 1 repetition maximum (RM) could selectively activate these muscles compared with a control condition of regular bench press. We were especially interested in investigating the association between intensity and the magnitude of selective activation, expecting decreased ability to selectively activate the respective muscles with increasing relative intensity. As stated in the Introduction of our article, this is a common training principle within bodybuilding, i.e. focusing on squeezing specific muscles to increase intensity of muscle contraction and enhance the pump with the long-term goal of muscular hypertrophy. Our results show that focusing on using specific muscles increases muscle activity at relative loads between 20 and 60 % of 1 RM, but not at 80 % of 1 RM during bench press. Thus, the basic premise for this type of training—i.e. that intensity of contraction can be increased by focusing on the specific muscles—holds true using light to moderate loads, which is congruent with practical experience. Because this was a cross-sectional laboratory study, we did not investigate whether this led to better long-term outcomes in terms of muscle hypertrophy or maximal strength. …