By Alexis Louise Reda
In the world of body building likely due to the ‘external’ nature of the process and culture surrounding their sport, many amateur athletes lack a deeper awareness required during training. This very awareness which I will be discussing here, that I have had to relinquish from yoga and apply in the weight room due to chronic pain, has anecdotally, turned out to dramatically affect adaptive volume progression requirements*.
Bodybuilding is quite a demanding sport. You are required to progressively and systematically overload your body both structurally and overall. To grow muscle and to lose fat, you can’t always go by “how you feel” to sustain progress. As we know from quantum science and emerging research on yoga, very simply, your mental states affect your physical; so as your ‘mental’ subtly gets ‘messed up’ when pushed deeper into a program’s progression set on taking your body to places it doesn’t naturally want to go, intuition becomes somewhat unreliable. Moreover, I’ve realized several yogic-practice integrations that are imperative to being the bodybuilder who is in it for the long-run. Let’s check them out:
Higher intrinsic awareness of the deep-core-line (DCL) muscles decrease your progressions spanning from minimum effective volume (MEV) to maximum recoverable volume (MRV) *, however, the fewer overall sets may cause as much as or more desirable training adaptations and less possibility of injury due to refocusing on and retraining typically underdeveloped core musculature. [* Note: MEV to MRV is that adaptive volume progression I was talking about – the scientifically-named progression strategy necessary to make measurable gains.]
But what you must understand is that it is possible to build an aesthetic body in such a way that the development of the DCL is neglected. That is a big red flag! You wouldn’t think so, and yet this is why many injuries occur – especially chronic ones; it means that a good-looking, ‘solid’ body isn’t always a solid one underneath.
When the DCL is ‘asleep,’ the superficial layer of muscles (i.e., the ones you can see moving in the mirror) take on the majority of the task you take on while pulling and pushing loads. However, at the same time, they try to stabilize the body instead of the DCL. So let’s take a closer look at this situation! We have the external muscles trying to get a good growth stimulus while also being employed, by the DCL’s forfeit, to hold posture and prevent the body from collapsing. Just think, if your coworker didn’t show up to work one day and you had to take on their full-day’s work alongside yours or else… Would you be just as effective at progressing in your own work? I doubt it.
If the deeper muscles – postural muscles – are not working to their full potential, the burden on your system doesn’t stop after the training session. All day, you are required to move and sit and swallow food (yes, the core line affects this). If you feel fatigued outside of the norm regarding your life stress, activity level, and age combined, and for no obvious reason, it might be that your external muscles – whose physiology is not or only moderately good at long distance, endurance and the buffering of oxidative stress – have just found themselves in the wrong line of work!
How can we combat this?
Here is where the yogic practices get infused:
Proper Breathing
The breath is more than a way to intake oxygen as a nutrient for your working muscles; in yoga, the breath is the life force. Integrative medicine research supports this eloquent way of describing the breath by its evidence of what it does to the DCL. Breath, that is basically shape change, organizes the musculature and from that organization the muscles can act in a better synergy, rendering the body both “lighter” and stronger. Many lifters pay little attention to how they breathe during any weight-bearing exercise; often as well, they’ll breathe through their mouth, which decreases one’s ability to keep the DCL adequately engaged. To understand this a bit more, we must distinguish between respiration and oxygenation. By respiration we mean the breathing process in its mechanical sense, while oxygenation is the chemical processes that take place within the alveoli and capillaries. Breathing is both a voluntary and an involuntary process; in other words we don’t need to pay any mind to it under normal circumstances, however, if we want to apply it consciously to any given task, we can. That said, there is no wrong way of breathing, there is only more or less practical ways of breathing based on what we want to achieve. applications of certain practices that one consistency in oxygenation (- even though it’s the automatic way to catch your breath after sprinting 30 seconds by the fourth or fifth round of intervals; but still, mouth breathing is never recommended by master yogis, though true, they aren’t sprinters). What’s more, if you don’t selectively control what muscles you allow this breath to let relax, you aren’t creating any tension at the deepest level. Knowing how to tense the deep core muscles against the breath in specific patterns (determined by movement) both when inhaling and exhaling – especially under load – will allow you to become your strongest in the least systemically-fatiguing way possible. When you zoom out to take a look at all of this, optimizing that stimulus-to-fatigue ratio (as it’s written in RP’s Scientific Principles of Strength Training textbook/e-book) leads to optimizing your potential for muscle gain and more.
Internal Locks
Pressures in the right places. Why do people neglect the feet when they try to teach you how to squat? What about during a standing biceps curl? Does pressure through the floor at three points in each foot mean anything to you? I’d bet it will be a revelation to you if you’ve never consciously employed such a thing before; possibly a life-saver…or at least a knee-, hip-, back-, shoulder-, and neck-saver! Yes, we’ve all heard that every building starts with a good foundation. That saying holds vitally true for exercise-execution with optimization of training effects and injury prevention in mind. In yoga, we have a posture called Tadasana or mountain pose. It seems easy – you just stand. But if all details were to be pointed out by our aforementioned master yogi, it will prove to be one of the most challenging postures. (Indeed, this is noted in several ancient texts!) Seeing as the DCL starts under the base of the big toe, we can activate that in any exercise by pressing it down. To counterbalance this, of course, we need to also secure the base of the pinky toe. All the while, we must be sure to not tend forward by keeping enough bodyweight over our heels. Maintaining the purposeful balance between these three as our body moves above it with or without extra load ‘sets the foundation’ insofar as it ‘tones up’ or ‘enlivens’ core muscles corresponding to those pressures all the way up the chain to the tip of your tongue and the back of your skull. Note: in bodybuilding, you can subtly manipulate the balance between these pressures to elicit more quadriceps recruitment over hamstrings, or vice versa. Knowing these tricks comes with the art and science of knowing thy body.
Maintaining Complementary Torque
What keeps bones strong as steel and resistant against torque (twisting force) in either direction? Concentric rings of fibers that run in opposing directions in an alternating pattern. In quantum, we know that the universe has a fractal nature, meaning that tiny-scale patterns are expressed infinitesimally at any scale larger or smaller. It is in our best interest to spot these patterns and make use of them in our daily lives. For us in fitness, this means the following: to at least metaphorically become as strong as steel, we must subtly, almost unperceivable, hold alternating outward and inward contra-lateral rotation starting from our foundation all the way up our legs and into our shoulder girdle. The first way you can feel this is by activating it from the base: as you press the ball of your big toe down, feel as though you are dragging your heels together. That instigates the outward rotation of the shins. To ensure that you secure the base of the pelvic girdle (pelvic floor activation), think about twisting the tops of your thighs from back to front inward. I know this all sounds weird, but the point is to create tension in the body to stabilize it around the activated core line. If you feel solid like a tree, you’re doing it right. Now just keep a slight bend in your knees to keep both your hip flexors and extensors active and ready for loading, soften your tailbone to the floor, and keep your upper chest lifted by bringing a lengthening sensation into your waistline and gently depress your shoulder blades (although there are some other determining factors regarding the subtleties of this action). Drop your chin slightly constrict the glottis for a more focused breath (ujjayi or victorious breath), and gaze to the direction of your nose at one point to balance. If this sounds like a lot, it’s because it is, at least until you get used to doing it! But this ties into my point that this core line set-up is meant to hold your body strong both effortlessly and naturally, and if it’s not feeling like that, then it needs refining through nervous-system conditioning!
Don’t be discouraged – it’s not the default posture anymore for most people in our society, and even most athletes don’t know about it because foundational yogic principles like the ‘breath’ and ‘bandhas’ (‘locks’ created within the body) are overshadowed by the more ‘eventful’, macroscopic allure of fitness-yoga. Fitness-yoga (i.e., non-individualized, high-speed yoga practice aimed mostly at performance with the prompts largely aimed at gross movements and external musculature activation to achieve postures) has its own place, but it will not carry over to optimal health, body-awareness, or bodybuilding. Yoga in its essence is slow and subtle, and in that, it is deceivingly difficult and strengthening, even for a person who is ‘already physically strong.’ (Read more of nervous-system conditioning here!)
So should you bother to use any of this? Retrain yourself? Sacrifice your reps, loads, even work capacity? Well, it would only be for a temporary time; indeed, it will be like taking one step back to take three steps forward… it’s a tough call if this is all new to you. I might not have bought it either when I was a new lifter and making gains no matter what I did, even if silly – as I would learn later. Seven years into this now, I cannot help but believe that had I practiced this from the beginning, I would have avoided many aches and pains.
All I can advise further is that you be careful not to lift with your ego. Opt to progress using subjective deviations from these subtleties as indicators. Technique is always first in any realm of training, and you should be proud of that. Only once you’ve mastered it – reliably – can you learn to push hard. People get that all backwards. It’s not worth the trade-off to work like a beast when it’s not coming from a grounded place. Do that, and you are by definition wasting energy per rep for less results. Learn to recruit your muscles from the true core, and you’ll spend less time in recovery and more time making gains!