How To Make Those Stubborn Muscles Respond

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Pinterest

What a wonderful thing it would be if you could go to the gym, do a solid workout, and see predictable gains … time and time and time again. Yeah … would be wonderful, but, er … it’s never gonna happen. You train hard and make gains … you train harder and make gains … sometimes, anyway … and you keep training harder, even to the point where you actually think it’s practically impossible to train any harder … and it all comes to a shuddering halt. No more gains. Progress stalls completely. You start to feel lousy and actually start to hate training, even the thought of it … and still, no progress.

Misery …

It happens to us all. The culprit is the body itself. It has a wisdom born of thousands of generations of development and evolution. It knows when to grow and when to preserve its precious, precious energy. We manage to trick it sometimes so it has to respond, but for the most part it’s wise to us and it just smirks and thinks … nah, I don’t think so … not this time.

The body’s survival instinct

It’s all about survival. The body wants to survive, no, it desperately needs to survive … at all costs. And part of survival, a vital part of it, is preservation of resources. The body knows just how much muscle it needs to cope with the demands placed on it, and it simply will not build another ounce unless it’s forced to. It would rather you added a few inches of flab around your middle than a half inch of muscle on your chest or your arms.

survivalThe flab is stored energy, in the form of fat, and it’s insurance against what might just happen. And it really might. Over the millennia it has seen earthquakes, fires, floods, pestilence, famine … lots and lots of famine … and other disasters we can’t even imagine.

Through it all, the human species didn’t die out. We’re still here, the living proof of our species’ survival instincts. We’re still here and our bodies know exactly what might happen and exactly how to be prepared for every eventuality.

That’s why it’s so very, very hard to build muscle. The body would sooner change eye or skin colour than add unnecessary muscle. Wasting precious energy building muscle and all the material necessary for its maintenance is right down there at the bottom of the body’s wish list.

First, you get grudging progress … and then …

So the body reacts by building muscle when you start a fitness program. But only grudgingly, because it’s not sure what’s coming next. It knows it has to make preparations for the expected onslaught that you’ve indicated might be just around the corner. But then you carry on doing much the same thing, day after day and week after week and you wonder why you’re not making any real progress. Don’t you have any idea how street smart the body is? Don’t you, really?

The body catches on fast. It’s way ahead of you. It knows what you’re up to, almost before you’ve got to the second set of your workout. There you go again, it thinks … same old thing … trying to force me to build unnecessary muscle, which is going to cost me a fortune, in energy terms, to preserve and maintain.

And it flatly refuses. Even though you’re putting on a good show of needing that new muscle tissue. Sad to say, you’re wasting your time. You’re pitting your puny intelligence against thousands, perhaps even millions of years of evolution.

So what’s the answer?

One way or another you have to get over this problem. Unless you want to spend the next ten years plodding away at fruitless workouts with absolutely nothing to show for them. You have to try and second guess the body.

Come up with something that’s just tricky enough so that the body thinks … oh, hang on … here we go … things are getting really bad now … gonna have to make some changes round here … drastic changes … might even have to build some muscle tissue … yeah, dammit, ain’t nothin’ else for it but to build some of that stuff that might just spell survival …

danger aheadIt’s the only answer. But it’s not easy. Remember, the body’s seen it all, over thousands and thousands of years. The only language it understands, the only ‘words’ that make it sit up and take notice, are DANGER AHEAD.

Somehow you’ve got to convince the body that this time it’s serious. No matter how many times you cried wolf before, this time the danger’s very real. That’s the message you have to convey to the body. Make it take notice. Do something drastic. Do something totally unexpected.

Well, it doesn’t have to be quite that drastic, in all fairness. The body has a wisdom born of evolution, sure, but it’s kinda like your subconscious … extremely powerful but not very bright. And it’s running on a fairly simple program, one that doesn’t actually involve any conscious thought. And you communicate with it via some very basic signals, rather than language.

Change is all that’s needed

So all you have to do is throw it a curveball! Do something it doesn’t expect. It can be something as simple as changing the order of your exercises, or using sets of 20-30 reps for a while, instead of your normal 10-12 or whatever. You can suddenly change to super-slow exercises for a while, with the concentric phase lasting five seconds and the eccentric phase maybe as much as 20 seconds. That’ll throw a spanner in the works! That’ll keep it guessing!

Stick with the new routine for a week or less and see what happens. There’s a good chance you’ll see some welcome growth. The body won’t be happy to oblige, but it’ll be taking no chances that this might be an indication of some serious changes in the pipeline, changes that it’s necessary to prepare for.