During workouts, it can often appear as though your body is the only involved participant. As it turns out, however, your mind is just as involved in the process, perhaps even more so. Understanding the muscle-mind connection and properly leveraging it can play a significant role in helping your future clients achieve their personal fitness goals when you become a health and fitness coach after completing your professional training.Â
In a nutshell, the muscle-mind connection emphasizes the conscious and deliberate use of directed focus for increased muscle activation during exercises. It involves concentrating the tension one produces during exercise on a particular muscle or group of muscles within the body.
This makes it sound effortless, but forming a muscle-mind connection extends beyond merely thinking about one’s muscles. The tips outlined in this guide can help you effectively harness the muscle-mind connection to plan and execute effective fitness programs for your future clients.Â
Promote Focused Attention After Fitness and Health Training
One of the biggest challenges you’ll see after fitness and health training is getting clients to practice focused attention. The ability of the brain to focus on one thing for a predetermined amount of time is known as focused attention. This contributes significantly to cognitive growth and functions effectively during resistance training.
Internal focus while training is the key to unlocking and harnessing the muscle-mind connection. It involves mentally focusing one’s attention on specific muscles or muscle groups during training to encourage increased activation.Â
When clients internally focus on muscles while they are exercising, they are mentally encouraging themselves to work harder. This is one way to encourage clients to activate and use the muscle-mind connection for better results during their workouts.Â
Encourage Clients to Visualize Their Workouts
Watching yourself train might seem vain, but there are actually lots of benefits attached to this practice. In fact, encouraging future clients to visualize their workouts is vital to unlocking and using the muscle-mind connection, as you will learn in fitness and health school.
Mental visualization will work just as well if mirrors are not available where clients are working out. Ensure they isolate the muscle they want to work on in their minds, then ask them to concentrate on that muscle. For instance, if a client exercises their biceps, ask them to pay physical and mental attention to that part of their arms while training.
Visualizing this way allows clients to actually see the muscles grow when they start getting a pump, which will further enhance their ability to create the muscle-mind link.
Offer Lighter Weights
Using a reduced load is one of the critical elements in developing a mind-muscle connection. Keep in mind that if clients use weights that are too heavy, the activation won’t be as high. Furthermore, going extremely slowly or considering the contraction when they are lifting something heavy is the last thing you’ll want to encourage. However, offering less weight to clients enables them to concentrate entirely on their muscles during workouts.
Remember to have clients perform their reps slower if they want to feel the muscles stretching and working from the start of their workouts to the end.Â
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