Do you focus on using your muscles to lift weights, or on lifting weights to stimulate your muscles? Using muscles to lift weights is the main focus of powerlifting, Olympic lifting, and strength training. In contrast, lifting weights to stimulate your muscles is the main focus of bodybuilding and body sculpting. Which one serves the other when you work out? Do your muscles serve your lifts, or does your lifting serve your muscles?
What Is Your Focus
Do you focus on lifting in a manner that matches your purpose? Check yourself to see what you focus on when you lift. If your main focus is on finding body positions and lifting motions that promote good leverage for lifting a lot of weight, you are more focused on weight lifting. In contrast, if your main focus is on finding body positions and lifting motions that create a strong contraction and a high degree of tension in the muscle you are targeting, you are focused on stimulating your muscles.
Lack of Focus on Muscles
From what I can see, it is much more common to focus on how much weight is being lifted than it is to focus on the feel of a strong contraction within the muscles. This is ok for any form of strength training; however, it is unfortunate that it also seems to be true for the majority of bodybuilders. It is easy for bodybuilders to fall into the trap of focusing more on the exercise being performed than the muscle being worked. Even if so called, “good form,” is being used, the focus is often on how much weight and reps are being lifted with good form. This is very different from forgetting about the weight and reps in order to focus on the stretch, contraction, and tension that can be sensed within the muscle being trained.
Adjusting to Focus on Muscles
There aren’t a lot of them, but there are some bodybuilders who don’t care a lick about how much weight they use during a workout. Their main focus is on doing each exercise in a manner that causes the muscle being trained to feel as though it is stretching, contracting, and jumping out of their skin. By adjusting the hand placement, the elbow placement, and the position of the shoulder blades, clavicle, and rib cage, it is possible to use a relatively light weight in order to produce a strong contraction through a full range of motion for various forms of presses, pulls, and rows.
It is hard to explain how to position your body best in order to focus on a specific muscle, because it will vary according to your own anatomy. Some lifters are fortunate to have the right anatomy to bench press a lot of weight while strongly engaging the chest muscles at the same time. Others will end up focusing the lifting stress on the front deltoids and triceps when they bench a lot of weight. These lifters will need to decrease weight and adjust their hand placement, elbow placement, and the lifting path of the bar in order to turn the bench press into a chest exercise. They may even need to simply do a different exercise with dumbbells or an incline or decline bench in order to focus on their chest muscles properly. The same concept applies to squats.
Individual Differences
Some lifters can really activate their quads when doing heavy squats, while others may feel it more in the hips, glutes, and lower back. Such lifters will need to either decrease the weight and change their lifting form, or they will simply need to do a different exercise to train their legs. There are many great bodybuilders who do traditional barbell back squats in order to obtain tremendous quad development. At the same time, there are many who don’t bother with squats because there are other exercises that produce a much stronger contraction on their quads. We could say the same things about deadlifts in regard to how well they focus the lifting stress on the lower back muscles. This is also true of overhead presses in regard to how well they focus the lifting stress on the deltoid muscles. Some lifters derive great benefit from deadlifts and/or overhead presses, while others don’t. Those who don’t will need to find alternative exercises that focus the lifting stress on their lower back and delts.
If your main focus is on strength, do your exercises in a manner that provides the best leverages for power. However, even those who want to focus on strength training can build up muscles and weak areas by occasionally focusing on training for the best muscle contraction, instead of the best leverage. If you do assistance exercises to compliment your main lifts, think about doing some of them by focusing only on the muscle, not the weight. This may mean using an exercise variation of a main lift that causes a big decrease in the amount of weight you can lift, but the benefit of the variation is that it causes a big increase in the stress you feel in a certain muscle. If you give it an honest effort, and it adds to your strength, keep doing it. On the other hand, if it proves to be a pointless distraction that detracts from your strength, throw it out. Keep what works and eliminate what doesn’t work, but you won’t know if an exercise or exercise variation works unless you try it out. May God bless you with the best of training
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