How to activate and strengthen a muscle in the most efficient way possible
If you want to get the best results in the gym, with the least chance of injury, then training has to be targeted and methodical.
It has to be mindful. It cannot be distracted. It cannot be about just moving the weight from A to B without any thought of how you are doing it.
You need to have some idea of where the muscles you are targeting attach and what they do to get optimal results.
Nowadays there is too much focus on training movements rather than training muscles. But if you don’t know how to activate, strengthen and optimize specific muscles, how are you going to perform complex movements involving multiple muscles.
Ultimately, this style of training, just like playing sport (which is also movement based), will lead to unwanted compensations and injury, unless you are one of the lucky few.
When you take your car in for a service, you don’t drive it to make it better, you work on the individual elements so that the car performs more efficiently and lasts longer on the road.
That is what the gym should primarily be for! To optimize individual parts, then to integrate them into complex movements and test (and improve) your capabilities in a control manner. Not the other way around!
This is the best way to improve function and when your function is optimized, your joint pain, stiffness, performance (and aesthetics) will all greatly improve!
As with any machine, to optimize individual elements, you have to isolate them as best as you can (although isolation does not truly exist in the body).
Multi-tasking gets the job done but it’s very inefficient.
An important part of optimizing your body and its individual parts is sensation; can you feel the muscle contracting.
In order to feel a muscle as best as possible you have to target it in the most efficient way and to do that involves using some simple physics principles.
If you want to lift something, with maximum efficiency, the direction of your effort force should be directly opposite to the force resisting.
Imagine lifting a rock with a piece of string off the floor; if you lift it directly up, all the force from the string goes into lifting the rock up.
In contrast, if you lift at an angle, the force is then split into components and you have to use more force to lift it the same distance upwards.
The same happens with muscles.
Let’s look at the glutes for example.
The gluteus maximus originates from the posterior ilium (upper pelvic bone), lateral posterior sacrum and coccyx and inserts into the posterior, lateral femur (upper leg) (see figure above).
You can see that the average fiber direction is therefore at approx. 15-30 degrees relative to the bodies centre line.
If you are face down on the floor and you try to lift one leg up into extension you are working against gravity. The muscle fibers that are directly in line with the plane of motion will be the biggest movers and therefore will be “activated” the most.
In this example when the leg is adducted or in a neutral position, the hamstring fibers will be directly in line with the plane of motion (as can be seen in the picture).
Because the glutes are pulling at an angle relative to the plane of motion (see picture), they will be having less influence over the movement and therefore won’t be engaged as efficiently as the hamstrings.
To recruit the glutes more effectively, we need to line up the average attachment points of the glutes into the same plane as the plane of motion.
To achieve that we have to abduct the leg 15-30 degrees, so that lines up with the fiber direction, and then lift the leg up in the plane of the leg. In this position, you should feel much more glute “activation”.
We can actually go one step further.
Depending on how lateral the femoral attachment is on a particular person, we could bring the insertion even more in line with the plane of motion by externally rotating the leg. This has an effect of bringing the attachment on top and therefore when the leg is extended there is a greater ability to bring the attachment points of the glutes closer together (i.e. shortening the muscle more).
This leads to a couple of simple principles to follow if you want to activate (and strengthen) a muscle as best as possible (which should be every time you train your body):
Align the attachment points (or average attachment points) of the muscle to the bone, as best as possible, with the plane of motion achievable at the joint (with some muscles it will not be possible to get a perfect alignment)
Ensure that the force the targeted muscle is resisting is in the same plane as the plane of motion and opposite in direction.
Keep the heavy end attachment point as still as possible as you bring the light end towards the heavy end (i.e. bring the two points together).
The cable machine is a great tool for targeting specific muscle fibers but make sure you follow the above principles when using it! See the video below: