I’m very fortunate that number of quality coaches reach out and offer to submit articles for this site. Granted they have to promise to name their first born after me AND send me a bowl of yellow only M&Ms, but that’s a small price to pay for internet fame.
Thanks to everyone who pinch-wrote for me in 2018 and gave my fingers a brief reprieve.
I’m looking forward to seeing what’s sent my way in 2019….
I listened to Noah speak in person on this topic and was transfixed by what he had to say. A conversation we had after the fact led to him writing this post for my site.
It was a lovely trip and I’m always sad to leave Europe, but we were ready to come back if for nothing else so Julian (our 1.5 year old) could back on a normal schedule.
I’ve been slacking in the writing department on my end of late, but I promise I’ve got some doozies lined up that will melt all of your faces off.
We had such a great response when Lisa and I hosted a SBSM Workshop in Boston last year that we decided to do it again this summer.
I’ll be speaking to assessment, coaching up common strength exercises (squats, deadlifts), and how to better “match” your programs to your client’s abilities and goals.
Lisa will be discussing how to better manage client expectations, motivation, and how to adopt better mindset strategies for success.
The umbrella theme of this workshop is to enhance the SOFTskills of coaching, how to garner a connection, and build rapport with your athletes/clients.
Spots are limited
Early Bird rates apply for both students ($99) and professionals ($129)
CEUs will be available (NSCA)
For more details (including itinerary and registration) go HERE.
Dean Somerset and I are currently in the throes of drumming up new content for our staple workshop series.
We’ve presented this workshop all over the world – London, Vancouver, Oslo, Prague, Boston, LA, Minas Tirith – and even turned it into a popular digital product HERE so everyone can enjoy it.
We’ve already nailed down dates in Slovenia, Houston, and LA this fall (2018) and are also in talks to bring it to Detroit, Philadelphia, Edmonton, Australia, and Singapore in 2019.
If you’re someone who’d like to host this event/participate in a tickle fight please reach out to either Dean or myself.
I wrote an article for the Personal Trainer Development Center on program design discussing some of the mistakes I’ve made throughout my career, as well as highlighting strategies that will undoubtedly help expedite the process for any fitness professionals out there who feel overwhelmed.
A few months ago I listened to Noah speak on the topic of muscular tension and how most trainees have zero comprehension as to just how integral it is for performance in the weight room.
Moreover, the strategies one can incorporate to increase muscular tension are fairly simple.
It was a very interesting presentation and I asked if he’d be up to writing a little sumthin, sumthin for the site.
The article linked to above is more or less a “part II,” the other side of the equation (what to do to decrease muscular tension), and something that helps bring the entire conversation full-circle.
I sometimes have a hard time differentiating the nefarious politicians from the shady personal trainers.
Both camps, it seems, will say or do anything to appear more important than they really are and to get a leg up on their competition.
I remember when I used to work in a swanky commercial gym here in Boston The Rock once asked me where a certain piece of equipment was located.
I answered (and immediately started hyperventilating into a brown paper bag).
I then moved on with my life. What I didn’t do was then proceed to brag about I used to train The Rock, when all I really did was point him towards the lat pulldown machine.
OTP Publications sent me a copy of this book a few weeks ago, and I ended up stuffing it into my suitcase for my European trip hoping to snake a few peeks here and there between Julian naps.
I’ve always been a fan of Sue’s work and this is no exception.
Definitely worth the price.
NOTE: Link above is not an affiliate link.
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If your clients have poor technique with the “boring stuff” like push-ups, rows, lunges, birddogs, etc……please, fix THOSE (I.e., do your job) before putting in rest-pause deficit deadlifts vs. chains with a 3-3-1 tempo into someone’s program.
A few weeks ago I presented at the Spurling Spring Seminar up in Kennebunk, Maine. The first presenter of the day, Portland based physical therapist Noah Harrison, blew me away with his talk on muscular tension.
Honestly, the only way his presentation could have been better is if he somehow included a pair of nunchucks.
Or a t-shirt cannon.
His message resonated with me and after he spoke I asked if he’d be interested in summarizing his thoughts in an article for my site. He was more than happy to oblige.
There are two aspects to what dictates the strength of a muscle; how big it is and how hard it can contract at any given moment, with any given movement. Keeping that in mind there are then two ways you can train a muscle to become stronger:
Make it bigger and give it more leverage.
Teach it to contract harder by creating more tension.
While hypertrophy obviously has its use, there are times our goal is simply to increase strength without having to buy a new wardrobe, or jump a weight class. There are also times we have a little more strength in our muscles as they already are, and it is simply a matter of getting them to work fully in the moment.
This article is about ways in which you can train your muscles to fire a little (or a lot) harder, instantaneously, and apply it to nearly any exercise you are performing.
Yes, you can practice tensing your muscles like a body builder during “X” movement, and if an EMG was attached to your area of focus it would read a spike.
The problem with consciously focusing on flexing your muscles during a movement is that this does produce increased tension locally where you are focusing, but often times at the expense of your performance. Quite often tensioning your muscles consciously while moving will result in you simply working harder, moving slower, and experiencing premature fatigue (1).
So how do you get your muscles to pump out more power without destroying your performance?
Simple: you will not do it consciously.
Instead you will do it reflexively. You will use the reflexive reactions you already have.
What I will map out are three body areas/actions that you can focus on with any given activity, and depending on what you do with these areas/actions will either elicit a reflexive increase or decrease in body wide muscular tension.
Again, this article will solely focus on increasing muscular tension.
The three areas/actions are:
What you do with your breath.
What you do with your hands.
What you do with your face.
Now there is no better place to begin talking about changing bodily tension than talking about…
What You Do With Your Breath
The general rule is that if you want to increase muscular tension then either hold your breath or forcefully exhale.
The latter, a forceful exhale, is preferred.
Why?
First, let’s look at what is happening with both these situations.
In one case you hold your breath and barrel down (a valsalva maneuver) and in the other you forcefully exhale through resistance. In both situations you are jacking up your intra-abdominal pressure (IAP), which is necessary to keep your trunk stiff and give your limbs leverage with anything difficult.
Core strength is pressure production, and if you want to be strong, you need to be able to make a lot of it.
However the valsalva maneuver (VM) has a few significant draw backs. The most notable is that you really cannot do many repetitions this way. One rep, maybe, but once you get to two or three repetitions deep into an exercise you will need to breathe.
The second drawback is that a VM is associated with some negative cardiovascular effects, including a sharp increase in your heart rate, blood pressure, as well as an increased risk of cerebral hemorrhage (2). Again, if it doesn’t kill you, holding your breath is going to gas you quicker than necessary.
The third problem is that a VM is associated with an increased risk of incontinence in certain populations (3, 4), which is not desirable if you or your client is trying to be active. Nobody, regardless of what Adam Sandler says, likes to pee themselves, and especially in the middle of a fierce effort.
Performing a forced exhalation (FE) has none of these issues, and has been shown to be as equally effective at spiking your IAP as a VM (2).
Additionally, a forced exhalation has been shown to increase the activation of your abdominal wall (5), is as effective at stiffening the trunk as bracing your abdominals (6), and even result in an instantaneous increase the strength of your grip and several large muscle groups throughout the body (2, 7).
We all know that a tight midsection is necessary to keep the body from crumbling during a strenuous task, but the take home from this should be to focus less on bracing your abdomen consciously.
Just forcefully exhale with the movement, and the abs will kick in automatically.
You have to breathe anyway; you may as well make it work in your favor. The general rule is to exhale with effort, and ingrain it with the movement you are performing.
How do you ingrain it? Every movement has a sticking point, you simply exhale through it.
See the video below for a demonstration of how to ingrain this into any exercise.
What You Do With Your Hands
This one is pretty simple.
If you want to increase body wide muscular tension, maximally tense your hands, preferably in a fist. If you are holding something, grip it hard (very hard). As a result, the rest of your body will “grip” harder as well.
In matters of strength, this is very convenient, because very often we are gripping something and either trying to move it (A barbell, dumbbell, kettlebell, etc) or ourselves around it (a pull up or dip bar). Simply aim your attention on what you are already doing.
How or why does this work? It probably comes down to both the law of irradiation, and how your cerebral cortex is organized.
Irradiation is a principle stating that the activity of a group of muscles will have a ripple effect on its neighboring parts (8). Meaning as you clench your hand harder, not only does your forearm tighten up, but your whole arm and shoulder does as well.
Grip even harder and your whole torso will become engaged. If you are not already trying this I encourage you to begin.
This has actually been measured, as research has shown that the harder you grip your hands, the harder your rotator cuff fires (9, 10). This is convenient, because if you are gripping a hold of something you would really like your shoulder to grab a hold of your body as well. Not only does gripping effect your shoulder, but your body as a whole; postural stiffness will increase the harder you grasp an obect (11). The utility of these reflexive responses with any pressing movement should go without saying.
So that is one factor, how about the second; your brain?
Well what is known is that there is a very large sensory and motor representation of both your hands and your face in the brain. Google “Homunculus Man” and you will see a model representation of this. It is a distorted image demonstrating the density of neurons in our cerebral cortex as it relates to sensing and moving our bodies in our environments.
You can think about this as that your brain both perceives and interacts with the world primarily via your face and hands, so whatever you do at these places will reverberate throughout your body.
If your hands are relaxed, your body will be as well. If your hands are tensed, then your brain will take you seriously and give you more juice. And in matters of strength, we all want juice.
So now we come to our third and final place to consider…
What You Do With Your Face
You may have a hard time believing your face matters so much in terms of strength, but it is true.
Do not forget that strange little homunculus man. Remember; your brain thinks the vast majority of you is face and hands. What you do in these places will resonate through your body.
What you do with you face can be further broken down into three factors;
Your eyes.
Your jaw.
Your facial expression as a whole.
Eyes
What you do at your eyes can be thought of as more steering your bodily tension than necessarily jacking it up or down.
It is well established that the body follows wherever the eyes gaze (12).
This means that if you look to the left, you will have a reflexive weight shift to the left, and the same goes for looking to the right, up or down. Although gymnasts, power lifters and weight lifters will use this often to their advantage to drive extension or flexion with a movement, the vast majority of us should stick to simply looking relatively forward with whatever movement we are performing.
So, for maximal tension; fix your eyes when doing something hard, and do not let them wander.
Jaw
Just as the tension in our hands seems to reverberate through our bodies, what we do at our jaws does as well.
No different than our hands, the amount of tension that we hold at our jaw has the ability to increase reflexive activity as distant as our forearms and calves (13, 14).
Yes you read that correctly; clench your jaw and your forearms and calves will fire harder. In fact, clenching your jaw has been shown to improve your athletic performance across varying endeavors, including a back squat and vertical jump (15, 16).
I would advise caution with this (and for some a mouthpiece), as some people have trouble relaxing their jaws then necessary engaging it. Other people may not have a fully congruent bite, and heavily clenching may cause more of a problem than a help.
Simply focus on setting your jaw and keeping your teeth touching firmly when you need more muscular effort.
Facial Expression
Think about it: setting your eyes and jaw is pretty much a game face now isn’t it?
Besides focusing on where your eyes look and keeping your mouth shut, it is common sense to be serious during a heavy or difficult lift.
Laughing is completely out, as it has been established that there exists a body-wide inhibition of muscular tension for up to 45 minutes after a bout of laughter (17, 18).
So, save the jokes for after the work is done.
Putting It All Together
Here it is; the meat and potatoes of it all.
If you want to increase body wide muscular tension, then simply:
Exhale with resistance.
Clench your fists.
Fix your eyes.
Set your jaw and be serious.
This comes down to learning to place your mental effort on these choice few factors with whatever challenging movement you are performing.
By doing this you set yourself up for the best chance at eliciting the highest potential your muscles and body as a whole has in that given movement, on that given day.
Integrate this into your training, and you will likely find that you become stronger not simply because your muscles have grown, but because they have learned to work together, better.
Enjoy!
[List of references below]
About the Author
Noah is a Physical Therapist and Strength Coach based out of Portland, Maine.
He is the owner of Portland Integrative Physical Therapy, through which he provides one-on-one musculoskeletal rehabilitation with a holistic, full body approach.
Noah has extensive training in a variety of rehabilitative approaches, and combines this with progressive strength training in order to build and restore strong and capable individuals.
Makaruk, H, Porter, JM “Focus of Attention for Strength and Conditioning Training” Strength and Conditioning Journal Feb 2014, 36:1 16-22
Ikeda, ER, et al “The Valsalva Maneuver Revisted: the Influence of Voluntary Breathing on Isometric Muscle Strength” J Strength Cond Res 2009 Jan: 23(1): 127-132
Nitti VW, et al “Correlation of Valsalva leak point pressure with subjective degree of stress urinary incontinence in women” J Urol 1996 Jan; 155(1): 281-5
Peschers UM, et al “Difference between cough and Valsalva leak-point in stress incontinent women” Neurourol Urodyn 2000; 19(6): 677-81
Ishida et al “Maximum expiration activates the abdominal muscles during side bridge exercises” J Back Musculoskeletal Rehabil. 2015; 27(4): 481-4
Ishida et al “Comparison between the effectiveness of expiration and abdominal bracing maneuvers in maintaining spinal stability following sudden trunk loading” J Electromyogr Kinesiol 2016 Feb; 26: 125-9
Li S, et al “Forced ventilation increases variability of isometric finger forces” Neurosci Lett 2007 Feb 2; 412(3): 243-7
Gontijo LB, et al “Evaluation of Strength and Irradiated Movement Pattern Resulting from Trunk Motions of the Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation” Rehabilitation Research and Practice Volume 2012, 6 pages
Sporrong H, et al “Influences of handgrip on shoulder muscle activity” Eur J Appl Occup Physiol 1995; 71(6): 485-92
Sporrong H, et al “Hand grip increases shoulder muscle activity, an EMG analysis with static hand contractions in nine subjects” Acta Orthop Scand 1996 Oct: 67(5): 485-90
Ustinova KI, et al “Postural stabilization by gripping a stick with different force levels” Gait & Posture 2013 May: 38(1): 97-103
Ivanenko YP, et al “Effect of gaze on postural responses to neck proprioceptive and vestibular stimulation in humans” Journal of Physiology 1999; 519(1): 301-314
Takashi T, et al “Modulation of H reflexes in the forearm during voluntary teeth clenching in humans” European Journal of Applied Physiology 2003 Nov; 90(5-6): 651-3
Miyahara T, et al “Modulation of human soleus H reflex in association of voluntary clenching of the teeth” J Neurophysiol 1996 Sep; 76(3): 2033-41
Ebben, WP, et al “Jaw clenching results in concurrent activation potentiation during the countermovement jump” J Strength Cond Res 2008 Nov; 22(6): 1850-4
Ebben WP, et al “Kinetic analysis of concurrent activation potentiation during back squats and jump squats” J Strength Cond Res 2010 Jun; 24(6): 1515-9
Paskind, J “Effects of laughter on muscle tone” Arch Neurol Psychiatry 1932; 28: 623-8
Overeem S, et al “Is motor inhibition during laughter due to emotional or respiratory influences?” Psychophysiology 2004; 41: 254-8
I’m in Kansas City for The Fitness Summit at the moment and basking in the company of friends and colleagues.
Dean Somerset and I were invited in a day early to put on a special Pre-Conference where we spent four hours covering new material we plan to use for our upcoming (Even More) Complete Shoulder & Hip Blueprint.
No one left early or threw a table at us so I consider that a success.
Anyhoo: I need to get back to hugging it out with people. Onto this week’s list.
Dean Somerset and I are currently in the throes of drumming up new content for our staple workshop series.
We’ve presented this workshop all over the world – London, Vancouver, Oslo, Prague, Boston, LA, Hoth – and even turned it into a popular digital product HERE so everyone can enjoy it.
We’ve already nailed down dates in Slovenia, Houston, and LA this fall (2018) and are also in talks to bring it to Detroit, Philadelphia, Edmonton, Australia, and Singapore in 2019.
If you’re someone who’d like to host this event/participate in a tickle fight please reach out to either Dean or myself.
My wife and I will be in Bonn, Germany on Saturday, June 30 to put on our 1-day Strong Body-Strong Mind workshop.
I’ll be speaking to assessment, coaching up common strength exercises (squats, deadlifts), and how to better “match” your programs to your client’s abilities and goals.
Lisa will be discussing how to better manage client expectations, motivation, and how to adopt better mindset strategies for success.
And then we’ll have a beer….;o)
Spots are limited and the Early Bird rate is still in effect (but not for long).
For more details (including itinerary and registration) go HERE.
^^^ It’s so good we didn’t even feel the need to come up with a witty title for it.
After my workshop in Germany I head over to London to take part in a 2-day event (the weekend of July 7th) with my friend and colleague (and handsomest man alive) Luke Worthington.
This one is filling up fast…..go HEREfor more info.
Brutal truth: if you’re not as lean as you want to be maybe instead of debating minutia like “how many carbs you can tolerate” (should I eat 172 or 112 carbs/day?) you just, you know, need to actually shut up and train. Seriously, go to work.
I have to apologize my dear readers, I feel like an abject failure of late.
Not for anything serious like failing to remember my wedding anniversary or for misusing the Oxford comma.1
No, I’m a failure for failing to keep up with writing content for this site of late. I know I shouldn’t beat myself over it – don’t worry, I’m not quite at Da Vinci Code monk flagellation levels yet or anything – but I do feel bad for my recent lack of prose and pithiness.
I’m sure your life will go on.
Nonetheless, I’ve got some blog ideas marinating in my head, and I hope to get them out ASAP.
Dean Somerset and I are currently in the throes of drumming up new content for our staple workshop series.
We’ve presented this workshop all over the world – London, Vancouver, Oslo, Prague, Boston, LA, Hoth – and even turned it into a popular digital product HERE so everyone can enjoy it.
We’ve already nailed down dates in Slovenia, Houston, and LA this fall (2018) and are also in talks to bring it to Detroit, Philadelphia, Edmonton, Australia, and Singapore in 2019.
If you’re someone who’d like to host this event/participate in a tickle fight please reach out to either Dean or myself.
Also, go HERE if you want to see if we’re coming to your neck of the woods.
My wife and I will be in Bonn, Germany on Saturday, June 30 to put on our 1-day Strong Body-Strong Mind workshop.
I’ll be speaking to assessment, coaching up common strength exercises (squats, deadlifts), and how to better “match” your programs to your client’s abilities and goals.
Lisa will be discussing how to better manage client expectations, motivation, and how to adopt better mindset strategies for success.
And then we’ll have a beer….;o)
Spots are limited and the Early Bird rate is still in effect (but not for long).
For more details (including itinerary and registration) go HERE.
^^^ It’s so good we didn’t even feel the need to come up with a witty title for it.
After my workshop in Germany I head over to London to take part in a 2-day event (the weekend of July 7th) with my friend and colleague (and handsomest man alive) Luke Worthington.
This one is filling up fast…..go HERE for more info.