Building muscle is vital for fat loss, injury/pain fixing and prevention, longevity, posture, hormone optimisation, and of course completely changing your body shape.
So how can you improve the way you train, turning your weaknesses into strengths and better develop your muscles to see and feel greater results?
Start by paying attention to what your doing. Fully connect with your muscles. By just lifting/throwing weight around from point A to point B with no thought process, no control and not contracting muscles, you will not develop that target muscle properly to achieve the body you want.
If your not in control of the weight, then the weight is controlling you. An exercise done correctly with less weight is better than doing an exercise poorly with more weight...
By using momentum and swinging the weight, or if you move your body into compromised positions as you fatigue to try and move the weight in any way possible, then your only cheating yourself.
An exercise should work where it's meant to work. Only the target muscle being trained should be working. If something else moves and takes the tension, then your robbing that muscle from growing and therefore making progress.
As an example, guys may often feel the shoulders more during a bench press instead of in the chest, resulting in over developed shoulders or a shoulder injury and an underdeveloped and weak chest.
So the take home point is, be in control the whole time. Slow down your movements. Drop the weight if you need to, learn to connect with your muscles, learn to contract them fully and keep tension in them in every rep. It's not just about lifting weight, but how you do the exercise. You'll make better progress in building muscle and strength.
