Edited by Dr. Dario Mirra
Training a muscle group with the methods of Bodybuilding does not simply mean lifting dumbbells and barbells, placing yourself under a Lat Machine and trying to pull up all the plates available (... perhaps while the most beautiful in the gym is watching us),
To achieve all this in a rational way, therefore to train a muscle correctly, it is necessary to have several parameters in mind, such as:
- Muscle anatomy. The first notion to be aware of! Never let it be said that while you try to train your pectoral muscle, you get caught by the room instructor performing side lifts!
- Know the type and number of joints on which the muscle performs its function. The muscles attach themselves to the bones, rigid structures of our body that allow movement through the interposition of these structures of mobile elements, the joints. Thus, the skeletal muscles exploit these joints (joints) to move the rigid structures (bones From here a muscle can be defined as monoarticular or biarticular, depending on the number of joints on which it acts.
- Know how the muscle makes its movements. Based on the previous principle it is obvious that the muscle must be stressed during our training from all available angles. It is well known that when working on a muscle, the hypertrophy is located more in the fixed point of the movement; from which, for example, to work the brachial biceps muscle, it would be good to exploit its characteristics of flexor of the forearm on the arm, such as it occurs for example in a barbell curl, or by reversing fixed and mobile points (as far as this may be possible), performing the typical reverse grip pull.
To fully exploit a muscle, I repeat that we must try to employ most of the actions that it can perform, in order to be able to involve the highest possible number of fibers. To give another example, let's imagine a front wheel drive on the lat machine. Watching a common user of any sports center perform this exercise, it will be easy to see that with each repetition he will arch his back and bring the bar to his chest.But if we take a "look at any book of biomechanics of the exercise" we can see that the number of muscles involved in the execution of the frontal lat are many, even if not all common to the different authors. We can broadly summarize them in:
- Great dorsal.
- Set of paravertebral muscles.
- Some of the motor muscles of the shoulder girdle (trapezius, rhomboid, angular of the scapula, great dentate, pectoral minor).
- Big round.
- Posterior deltoid.
- Subspinous.
- Brachial biceps.
- Brachioradialis.
- Long head of the brachial triceps.
All these muscles, in the execution of the front lat machine, will perform three main movements, such as: retropulsion of the humerus, adduction of the shoulder blades and hyperextension of the spine.
- The dominance of the type of fibers that make up the trained muscle. Therefore, whether they are more of type I or type II, in order to give an effective stimulus to the muscle we are working on. For example, the soleus muscle, deep calf muscle, is composed of 75% Slow Twitch (Pierrynowski and Morrison 1985) from which it is easy to understand that it would be more correct to train it with a medium-high number of repetitions. On the other hand, the brachial triceps muscle is made up of 67% Fast Twitch type "b" (Johnson et al. 1973), so in this case it might be more physiological to subject it to work with a medium number of repetitions. low (at least in theory).
- Knowing the synergistic muscles for movement. All the movements, from the simplest to the most complex, that we have available to move in the daily or in our Bodybuilding training, however meticulous and precise, will never involve a single muscle, but always a set of muscles that will compose those which is commonly called "kinetic chain"; from which we will have the main muscle called "agonist" to which other muscles called "synergistic" will support the movement. For example, in our bench press the trained muscle, and in this case the agonist, will be the pectoralis major, and some of the synergistic muscles will be the deltoid and the triceps.
Conclusions
Those just reported are small suggestions, which will allow you to train a muscle group in the best possible way according to the principles of Bodybuilding from a mechanical and physiological point of view, as, as previously explained, even an apparently simple exercise hides behind its own execution of the rules. , perhaps not very evident, but which make his practice effective, which would be reduced to gestures with no logic, were it not for a rigorous theoretical knowledge.
