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Get better results from more than 20 exercises with this workout wake-up call.
Have you been squatting up a storm without seeing your posterior plump up with muscle, or do your chin-ups triple your trap size without building your back? Then it’s time to give those lazy muscles a wake-up call with some pre-activation exercises.
Pre-activation — aka corrective exercise, active warm-up or post-activation potentiation (PAP) — is a technique that involves “turning on” a target muscle with an isolation or conditioning exercise before the main lift or activity you’re doing. A lot of muscles are lazy or shut down (the gluteals, lats, abdominals and deeper core muscles are notorious slackers), usually because of improper mechanics or lifestyle trends, such as sitting a lot during the day. The inactivity of these muscles means that other muscles — like your quads, lower back and traps — take over as a result, reducing the effectiveness of the exercise, creating a poor movement pattern and putting you at risk for injury. And you clearly don’t get the results you want, which can lead to disappointment with your training.
Pre-activating the muscles you’re trying to work with a specific movement will kick-start your neural drive — specific parts of your nervous system — and get you on the road to the results you’re after.
Mind Over Muscle
But it’s not enough just to do the movement — you’ve also got to get your gray matter involved. It’s not a matter of mind over muscle but rather mind into muscle. Research has shown that focusing on a muscle and/or visualizing it contract can improve activation and hypertrophy results, meaning your muscle will grow. So if you concentrate hard on your glutes when doing a one-legged bridge, for example, you are better able to replicate the sensation of the intense gluteal contraction and make a deadlift more effective. This neuromuscular training — getting your body to do exactly what your brain tells it to — will eventually become an unconscious pattern that your muscles automatically follow, but for now, it takes practice.
The key with pre-activation is to wake up and engage the proper muscles without pre-fatiguing them, thereby making them less active. In order to prime the neuromuscular system to turn on those fibers without pooping them out, pre-activation exercises have to be done either at a light to moderate intensity or at a high intensity for just a few reps.
With all this in mind — it seems more complicated than it really is — integrate the corresponding pre-activation moves into your warm-up before the indicated main exercises and target muscles. Do one to three sets of 10 to 12 reps using light to moderate resistance if you’re a newer workout warrior or three to five reps using heavier resistance if you’re more advanced. Remember: Don’t rush and instead focus on the entire contraction — positive and negative, up and down — with your brain and your body working in unison!
Last updated on Apr 26, 2018
Minor bug fixes and improvements. Install or update to the newest version to check it out!
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PA CK
Requires Android
Android 4.0.3+
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Isolate Your Muscles
1.0.0 by AppxMaster
Apr 26, 2018