The Benefit of Mind-Muscle Connection

Yesterday, I dunked a little bit on mind-muscle connection (MMC).

So…I wouldn’t blame you if you assumed that I’m anti-MMC.

But real-world practice lives in the gray area. In application, very few concepts are black and white (or at least, the application of certain concepts).

So we must always question our beliefs and consider contexts in which we could be wrong.

I’d like to personally thank one of the Modern Meathead Community members, Piotr (who I prefer to call “Big P”) for asking me to present the “upside” of MMC because I wouldn’t have thought to do it otherwise.

To briefly review some of the features of MMC that are potentially counterproductive:

• Emphasizing the “squeeze” so that we contract muscles that inhibit force production in target muscles.

• Increased complexity of learning as a consequence of the above. Often, I see people “overthinking” motions because of a hyperawareness of sensation and an intent to “squeeze” everything possible.

So where’s the nuance here? Is there a time and place when focusing on the “squeeze” intent is useful?

I believe that there is but with several caveats.

In general, the extremes along any spectrum are where we start to see problematic outcomes.

For example, most extreme diets fail (for the average person) in the long term. This is because extreme strategies require extreme efforts, and extreme efforts are far more difficult to maintain chronically than more balanced ones.

Of course, there are times and places where extreme strategies are necessary, but for the normal person looking to grow muscle, lose fat, and gain strength, extreme strategies yield results acutely and end up failing over longer periods.

However, the extremes are deceptive because they usually work in the initial stages. This creates the guise of progress immediately but is typically unsustainable.

Imagine someone who wants to lose weight and normally eats an average of 4,000 calories per day.

If on day 1 of a diet, this person eats 2,000 calories, they’ll see substantial “results” immediately - they’ll have far less food in their stomach, they’ll likely see a loss of water retention/bloating, and so on.

But after several weeks (or potentially days), this person will begin to feel the effects of this extreme (-50%) calorie reduction.

The rare individual may be able to power through this discomfort, but in my experience, most quit before they’ve overcome the inertia of old habits.

In the same sense, extremes of any training protocol are likely to yield immediate “results” in some way but are typically unsustainable or result in a lack of progress/injury over longer periods.

In the case of MMC, someone may shift from using excessive loads, poor technique, and poor control in all their exercises to using more appropriate loads and far better control. They may also feel much better “pumps” as a consequence of this.

This is a context in which focussing on MMC may yield upsides that outweigh the downsides. In this context, emphasizing MMC is a useful strategy to create more awareness of control and technique.

This does not mean that emphasizing MMC is the best across all scenarios or that it should be the only strategy that a person uses over the long term.

Rather, for a given person in this context, the direction that focusing on MMC brings this individual yields relatively better outcomes than the prior strategy.

So this is potential upside #1 - where emphasizing MMC takes an individual from a place of poor load selection, execution, and control to more appropriate versions of these variables.

Another potential upside is in the case where an individual has little to no awareness of their bodies. While this is typically a characteristic of beginner trainees, I’ve also seen this in people who have trained for years.

A complete lack of awareness is just as counter-productive as too much awareness. Lacking awareness leads to similar faults in execution, wherein target tissues may be inhibited in their contraction, and learning curves are steep.

In this context, bringing more awareness to how contracting a muscle feels can be very useful, and in and of itself may not be counter-productive to the goal of challenging a target tissue.

Notice that both of these potential upsides are related to taking individuals away from the extremes of poor execution toward a more balanced middle-ground of control and awareness of their bodies.

The minute that MMC gets taken to the extreme - where sensation and “squeezing” are all one concentrates on - counter-productive strategies begin to arise.

So, to briefly summarize the potential benefits of a MMC-focus:

• MMC can aid in improving an individual’s control, load selection, and technique if they’re currently in a place of lackluster execution.

• MMC can bring awareness to an individual’s ability to use target tissues, improving their ability to contract against an external resistance under control.

An important caveat: many people become attached to MMC because it yields better-perceived outcomes such as “pump” in the target tissue immediately. But this is not necessarily because of MMC but rather the indirect consequences of using improved exercise setup and execution.

Once you have sufficient body awareness and you’re able to set exercises up appropriately, thinking as little as you need to (and no more) is likely ideal in the long term for the reasons I discussed in yesterday’s newsletter.

If there’s any takeaway from this newsletter, it’s this: the effect of strategies in exercise (and in any other field) often depends on where an individual currently is. Do not confuse movement in the desired direction with a strategy being best for everyone, or even best for the individual in question in the long-term.

This is why strategies that take you from 0-1 are often not the strategies that will take you from 1-2. Meet the individual - whether yourself or your clients - where they’re at and use the appropriate strategy accordingly.