More about body building

As mentioned in a previous post, body building has generally fallen out of favor and has been replaced by "functional fitness,""an exercise appraoch that focuses on compound exercises that work more of the body's muscles in a more efficient manner. This is a good thing.

BUT, there is still value in incorporating a body building approach to your training. Here's why: With body building, the goal is to isolate specific muscles. You can focus on a particular muscle to grow and shape it into how you'd like it to look. It's a method steeped in aesthetics but not necessarily function. If you think of your body as a sculpture, the quality of the clay comes from your strength training. You want the strongest clay possible if your sculpture's going to last. Body building allows you to shape the clay exactly how you'd like it to look.

But here's the best reason to practice body building: it helps you develop and practice the "mind-muscle connection." What is that? It's your ability to mentally connect with the muscle you've isolated and targeted. Take the bicep curl. This type of isolation exercise allow you to fully invest your thought and focus into the working bicep. This is not true for an exercise like the deadlift. With a deadlift, you're not thinking about your hamstrings, glutes, lats or rhomboids, you're focused on lifting the weight.

When you do a bicep curl, you're full invested mentally in the entire movement. the stretch, the flex, the holding of the contraction. You have a mental image of how you want that muscle to look and through this focus, you"will" the bicep to change. Practicing and honing this skill is a must. If you're distracted when you lift and not focused on the muscle you're supposed to be working, you're wasting your time. Not to mention being potentially dangerous. And if you ever see someone yakking with their trainer during a lift, the client deserves a refund.

Focu in your training is of the utmost iimportance. Getting "in the zone." Not only do you get the most from your workouts, you're able to take an hour of your day and put your focus into something that's completely in your control. All the other stresses in your life disappear as you put all your thought into changing that bicep muscle into something beautiful.

See you in the gym,

Revo Fit