Know Your Muscles

Muscle isolation is a mind-body technique that will supercharge your muscle development. Want to learn about it? Keep reading.

The question is: what percentage of each of your muscles do you engage in the exercises you perform? An electromyographic study has already answered this question. Greater intensity is created in the primary muscle being worked if the athlete initially lowers the total training weight and is able to involve or recruit the maximum number of muscle fibers of the primary motor (muscle to be developed), with minimal participation from other muscles.

How to transmit a greater percentage of intensity to the target muscle?

1. By having a basic knowledge of human anatomy: where the muscle we are going to train goes from and to (insertion and origin), and what the arrangement of its muscle fibers is.
2. By mastering the perfect technique of each exercise.
3. By learning the muscle isolation technique.

Muscle Isolation

It is an athlete's ability to learn to create an intense mind-muscle connection. To work by trying to engage or recruit the maximum number of muscle fibers of that muscle, while minimizing the involvement of other muscle groups.

This technique becomes very difficult when the athlete is more concerned with moving weight and reaching the proposed repetitions than with maximizing localized work.

To achieve this goal, it is very important that you review the execution of the techniques in the different exercises of your program. Of course, once this muscle isolation technique is learned, we cannot fall into the simplicity of isolating and that's it; instead, we need new stimuli such as the progressive use of increasing loads.

Training with muscle isolation

We will continue to apply the progressive loading system to this program with one modification: I propose the descending set technique.

This involves completing the established number of repetitions, reaching muscle failure or having performed some forced repetitions, and from that point progressively decreasing the weight. The weight we remove must be sufficient so that we can perform three or four more repetitions, compared to the previous set, before reaching muscle failure.

This technique will test your character and integrity as athletes, as it will contract the muscle to levels it is not accustomed to. This technique is not advisable to apply systematically in all programs, because it causes significant wear and tear that could lead to an overtraining state.

I hope you enjoy the workouts applying these techniques and that they allow you to improve your physical fitness.