This mistake can cost you 40% of your gains

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:33 Sensing mechanical tension

02:29 Subjective vs objective muscle activity

03:32 What exactly do we feel while exercising?

04:22 Hypertrophy zone myth

05:10 Senations vs muscle growth

06:26 Exercises vs muscle growth

10:24 Conclusion

Transcript:

What is the best way to select your exercises for maximum muscle hypertrophy? Many people select their exercises largely based on how they feel. They try an exercise, see if they feel the target musculature well, they maybe try to tweak the exercise a bit to see if they feel it better, and if they don’t feel the exercise in a muscle that they’re trying to train they select a different exercise. Research has found that doing this may be costing you up to 40% of your gains. Muscle growth is primarily caused by mechanical tension. So in order to sense which exercises are best it’s necessary that we sense the amount of mechanical tension in our muscles when we exercise. Is this possible? Yes it is.

We have these things in our muscles called Golgi tendon organs. Golgi tendon organs can accurately sense the amount of mechanical tension that is being produced by a muscle. However, there is one teeny tiny problem with this. The information from the Golgi tendon organs is not sent to the conscious part of our brain. Most of this information enters the subconscious areas of the brain. So even though the information is there and it’s being registered, it’s not sent to the part of the brain that we can access. We cannot access the information and this is particularly true for re-affirmed signals which is sensory feedback that is stimulated by our own motor actions. This is also why we cannot tickle ourselves. If you try to tickle yourself you are trying to trick the brain because the brain already knows that you’re doing it yourself. You’re giving the motor commands to stimulate yourself and you don’t process that information in the same way as someone else does. You don’t have the surprise factor, essentially, because the brain already knows that you are giving the motor commands and what the result of that is. It’s not necessary for the brain to process the sensory feedback in the same way.

This also explains things like force escalation, where if you have two people that are holding each other’s hands and you ask them to squeeze in the other person’s hand, then you will often see that there is force escalation, meaning that they start squeezing harder and harder. Because if I squeeze your hand and then you squeeze my hand, when I squeeze your hand I don’t feel the tension as much because I’m generating the tension myself. But you feel the full brunt of the force. So you then think, oh, that’s quite hard. So you try to mimic that amount of force and you do it harder because you felt it harder than I felt it. Then I feel the amount of force that you produced and I do the same thing. So you get force escalation. This can also explain why in martial arts, even if people are friendly and they’re sparring with good intentions, sometimes things can get out of hand purely because we don’t sense the kicks and the punches we throw as much as other people feel it. Now that’s all pretty theoretical.

What about actual research looking at the relationship between subjective muscle activity, like how well we feel a muscle group, and objective measure of muscle activity. We currently have only one study that directly did this. They did it in bodybuilders, I’ve actually discussed this study on my channel before, “results suggested that the subjective sensation of muscle contraction was inconsistent with objective muscle activity”, and that was the group average of highly trained bodybuilders. We also have a study that I coauthored by Plotkin et al., where we compared hip thrust vs squats. We found that subjects pretty much universally preferred hip thrusts. Almost everybody, I think literally everybody actually in the study said that they felt their glutes more during hip thrusts. However, throughout the course of the study, we found that squats produced just as much muscle growth in the glutes as hip thrusts clearly showing a big difference between how much people felt a muscle group and how much muscle growth was actually being stimulated.

I’m currently involved in a more comprehensive study on the relationship between subjective and objective muscle activity the current state of research, though, is not very promising when it comes to our ability to detect how well a muscle group is actually working during an exercise. Clearly, though, we feel something. What, then, is it that we feel when we’re exercising, because we feel something’s happening in the muscle group? I think it’s mostly the sensation of stretch and importantly, the pump. I think people massively overestimate the pump as an indicator of good gains and an effective exercise. I think the pump is also the primary reason why people used to think that short rest intervals were more effective for muscle growth, because you get a lot more metabolic stress, a lot more pump when you don’t rest fully in between your sets. But for mechanical tension it’s actually better to rest longer and we see in research that people get more muscle growth when they do more total volume due to having longer rest intervals.

Similarly, a lot of bro bodybuilders are very much drawn to mid-range partials. Mid-range partials are an excellent way to get a good pump, but research quite conclusively shows that training with a full range of motion, or doing the partials in the more lengthened part of the movement is better for muscle hypertrophy. An overemphasis on the pump might also explain the myth of the bro hypertrophy zone of like 6 to 12 repetitions that supposedly maximizes muscle growth. In reality, we now know quite conclusively that the range is more like 5 to 30 and perhaps even broader. I think the reason that people thought that low repetition sets, say, a set of five repetitions was very ineffective for muscle growth was primarily because it doesn’t give you much of a pump and you don’t feel a lot of your muscles. You just feel sort of overall sensation of being crushed if you’re doing heavy squats or deadlifts, but you don’t get like a really good mind-muscle connection with your quads or anything. On the other end of the spectrum, if you do very high repetitions, you don’t feel a lot during the early repetitions, and it takes a while before you get any pump or burn, therefore, people thought, oh, that’s not very effective, even though we now know quite conclusively from research that even very high repetition sets are very effective for muscle growth, as long as you take them close to failure. So that’s why our sensations, when we do feel something, that’s something- it’s not necessarily indicative of muscle growth and a good training stimulus. On the other hand, if we don’t feel something, we also have clear researches and cases where we do actually get a good training stimulus. This is especially the case for the glutes, for example.

Research has found that this idea of gluteal amnesia is largely a myth. A lot of people don’t feel their glutes when they’re doing squats, for example, as we also found in our study. But that doesn’t mean they’re not working hard. Research very conclusively shows that squats are an excellent exercise for the glutes. Research has also looked at gluteal activation drills. A lot of people feel that whereas they normally don’t feel their glutes during squats, when they do glute activation drills in their warmups the glutes now wake up supposedly, and they do feel them. This theory has also been very comprehensively debunked in multiple studies. In reality, what was probably happening is that when you are focusing more on your glutes with your warmup drills, you’re exercising them more, they literally warm up a bit more, you probably feel them more. Or it’s possible that some people feel them more, at least. For me they also don’t do anything. But if you feel them more because you’re focusing more on them, that doesn’t mean that they’re actually activating more. It just means that you’re now focusing more on them. Or in general, maybe there is more subjective sensory feedback, but it doesn’t mean that objectively there’s more motor activity in the muscle group. If we look at studies that compared different exercises and looked at how much muscle growth they got in a certain muscle group from different exercises, we also see that the results are quite clearly diverge from what people intuitively prefer or do or sense in their muscles. For example, for the triceps, push downs are far more popular based on my experience and Google search data than overhead the triceps extensions. Yet, as I showed in a recent video, overhead triceps extensions stimulate 40% more growth than triceps push downs, according to the best study we have on this topic.

We also have a nice study that compared seated leg curls versus lying leg curls, and seated leg curls were far more effective than lying leg curls for the hamstrings. To my knowledge, there was nobody in the industry saying that seated leg curls were far more effective than lying leg curls. In my experience, most people prefer lying leg curls, or people equally prefer seated and lying like curls. Another example we see from research is with calf raises. In my coaching experience, quite often when people cannot do a straight leg calf raise, what they do is a bent leg calf raise. So they do to the seated calf raise instead of the standing calf raise. In reality, seated calf raises don’t work the calves nearly in the same manner. You take out of the gastrocnemii, which is like the big, bulgy, calf part that most people think about when they think of their calves. It takes it out completely out of the movement. So seated calf raises are almost entirely ineffective to train the gastrocnemii. You’re training the soleus, which is kind of the thinner muscle underneath when you’re doing a seated or specifically bent leg calf raise. When you’re doing a straight leg or standing calf raise you train the entire part of the calves. So clearly a lot of people don’t realize they don’t feel that they’re omitting an entire muscle group, essentially, from the exercise.

In my recent video on triceps training I also show research that the bench presses and pushups are relatively ineffective to train the long head of the triceps because of its bi-articulate muscle conflict. We see that triceps isolation exercises stimulate substantially more muscle growth in the long head of the triceps, and therefore the total triceps compared to doing bench presses and pushups. Yeah, bro wisdom says that bench presses are an excellent triceps exercise. And there are all of these threads on bodybuilding forums, social media, about why powerlifters have amazing triceps, but their pecs are not necessarily as good as those of bodybuilders- it’s because they do a lot of bench pressing, supposedly. In reality we see that bench presses are not that great for the triceps because they don’t stimulate the largest, most important head very well. No pun intended. I’ve also previously talked about how leg extensions are actually a more complete squat exercise than squats. Prevailing bro wisdom is that squats are the best exercise possible for the quads, but research shows that the rectus femoris, the middle head of the quads is not trained well at all, literally barely trains, by squats because again of its bi-articulate muscle conflict. Leg extensions don’t suffer from this problem and therefore stimulate the entire quads. I’ve yet to meet any person that subjectively felt this before they knew of the biomechanics and the research, even though the biomechanics are quite clear.

We see this inability of ours to detect muscles not activating due to bi-articulate muscle conflict also in research on squats. Squats are a very, very poor hamstring exercise. The hamstrings barely grow from squatting. Yet a lot of people for a long time thought that squats were in fact an excellent hamstrings exercise, and many bodybuilders still classify squats as a total lower body or a total leg workout. I remember there was even a big argument where a Rippetoe, who has studied biomechanics and trained tons of people, still argued in defense of squats being a great exercise for the hamstrings. So clearly even very experienced, very knowledgeable people who have even studied biomechanics can still make gross errors in how effective certain exercises are for certain muscle groups. As a final example, I’ve made videos on this channel about the effect of grip width during bench presses and pull ups. Most people intuitively find that chin ups with a more closer grip and a supinated grip versus a pronated or slightly wider grip has a much, much stronger effect on their biceps. You feel the biceps a whole lot more during a close supinated grip chin up, than during a more moderate grip pull up or a neutral grip, slightly wider grip pull up. In reality, the differences are super small, probably insignificant for most trainees. Similarly for the bench press, the effect of grip width is massively overstated. If you go super wide, yes, there will be a slight decrease in triceps activity, but it’s not nearly as large as you would think or feel.

In conclusion, while we don’t have a whole lot of research directly comparing subjective and objective muscle activity, the current research quite clearly shows us that relying on your feelings to select your exercises and to see which muscles are being activated is a very fallible way to select your exercises. You should be very skeptical of what you feel, and just because you don’t feel a muscle group during the exercise does not mean it’s not being trained well. And if you do feel a muscle group, you should be skeptical if that’s really mechanical tension that you’re feeling or some other sensation like the pump or stretch that may not correspond with muscle hypertrophy in the long run. If you think about it, it’s actually quite obvious that we don’t have this internal sense of how well a muscle group is being trained by an exercise, because most people, when they do an exercise, the very first thing they ask is which muscle groups does this train? Clearly, we cannot just sense it. So the take home message is: You should rely primarily on science and biomechanics to select your exercises and you should take your feelings with a big grain of salt. I don’t recommend fully ignoring your feelings, and especially listening to pain signals can be very productive, but I think biomechanics and scientific research should take precedence over anything that you feel. You shouldn’t worry too much about not feeling muscle group during exercise. That doesn’t mean your program is not effective. I hope this knowledge helps you design better training programs and if you find this useful I’d be honored if you like and subscribe.