Lifting Heavy, Lifting Light

I had someone come up and ask me the other day why I was using such a light weight on my chest. I responded that it was my third chest exercise and that the day anyway was a ‘lighter’ day for me. What confused him is that I had previously worked in with him on sets using a lot heavier weight.

Getting stronger is an important measure of progress but not at the expense of stimulating the muscles effectively.

What a lot of people fail to understand about bodybuilding training is that it is not always about how much weight you are lifting. I categorise bodybuilding training as lifting weight to improve the size and overall appearance of the musculature. Power lifting is a completely different kettle of fish and I’ll save that for another day.

The key is to be able to feel the muscles working properly. Form and technique is an important aspect in order to achieve this. If you are only using partial range repetitions because the weight is really too heavy for you to lift properly you are not only cheating yourself out of some hard earned muscle growth, but you are more likely to injure yourself also.

Developing a ‘mind-muscle’ connection so that you can feel the muscle working is also crucial. This often means that you need to lower the weight and perform the repetitions a bit more slowly until you start feeling it where you are supposed to.

I often hear people complain that they can’t get their chest or back to grow; this is often because they are just trying to lift the weight without any thought as to where they are trying to work. Consequently these people can quite often have quite nice shoulder and arm development because those body parts are taking most of the effort!

Drop the weight and the ego and really focus on trying to feel the muscle you are working. Give your tendons and ligaments a break and stop trying to lift heavy every time.