Mind in the Muscle

I wrote this 4 years ago now. Seems somewhat quaint but I still believe in the importance of the mind-muscle connection, perhaps now more than ever. Enjoy:

Dragon’s Principles of Mental Training #3
by Charlie Dragon

“The body will never fully respond to your workouts until you understand how to train the mind as well. The mind is a dynamo, a source of vital energy. That energy can be negative and work against you, or you can harness it to give yourself unbelievable workouts . . .Whenever you hear about anyone performing unbelievable physical feats – Tiger Woods in golf, Michael Jordan in basketball, Michael Johnson in track, Hermann Maier in skiing, and so many more athletes – it is because of the power of their minds, not just technical, mechanical skill.”
-- Arnold Schwarzenegger, The New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding


#3 – “Mind in the Muscle”

It’s surprising to find out that bodybuilding, of all activities, is incredibly mental. Think of how important that makes the mind in swimming! In swim-ming, this principle is often referred to as “feel for the water.” Feel is an elusive thing, hard to define, hard to understand. Feel is tied closely to technique and efficiency, but it’s more than that. Feel is also partly the tactile sensations of water on your skin – literally the feeling of swimming. But I think feel is also about your ability to feel, as deeply as possible, the movements of your muscles. Feel is an awareness in your mind of what your muscles are doing.

Your ability to feel the water against your body, feel how your muscles move in the water, and make small but essential technical adjustments all come from this awareness. Some people have a much greater degree of natural feel than others, which is why many coaches believe feel cannot be taught -- you are either born with it or not. I agree that people do have very different de-grees of mind-muscle connection naturally, but I believe that awareness can be greatly improved in everyone. To get a mental picture of feel for the water, think about a swimmer who you have seen swim fast with seemingly little effort. A smooth, flowing stroke is how we can tell visually if someone has good feel.

“The key to success in your workouts is to get the mind into the muscle, rather than thinking about the weight itself [applied to swimming, thinking about the muscles in use rather than the number of laps or time]. When you think about the weight instead of the muscle, you can’t really feel what the muscle is doing. You lose control. Instead of stretching and contracting the muscle with deep concentration, you are simply exerting brute strength.”

That quote captures the difference between just going up and down the pool and truly experiencing, feeling, what you are doing. When your mind is in your muscle the experience of training becomes completely different. You will see results much more rapidly and the training itself will become more enjoya-ble. The best time to practice feel is during slow swimming (warm-up, recovery, drills, warm-down) and when stretching. It’s been said that the great Russian swim teams of the early 1990s would be in the pool many hours each day, but much of that time was spent swimming slowly and doing drills to improve feel for the water.

Try to feel as many of the muscle fibers engaging, stretching and con-tracting as you can. As you pull against the water in a freestyle stroke, for in-stance, try to feel your forearm, shoulder, and core muscles engage, then your upper back, your triceps as you finish the stroke, and then your deltoid as you recover over the water. Feel the muscles in your legs as you kick, and feel your lungs as you breathe.

Arnold tells us that “one repetition [or one lap for us] with full con-sciousness is worth more than ten with no awareness at all.” Think about that for a moment. The better your focus, the fewer laps you need to swim to get the same results. Ask yourself, do you swim robotically, with no thought? Or are you constantly thinking about the wrong things, like how long the set is, or what the next set will be? The consequences of swimming with no awareness are hundreds of wasted laps and hours of exhaustion that don’t make you fast-er!

“It became part of my routine that year to start out every day with total concentration. The way I did it was to play out exactly what I was going to use, how I was going to pull my muscles, and how I would feel it. I programmed myself. I saw myself doing it; I imagined how I would feel it. I was thoroughly, totally into it mentally. I did not waver at all.

When I went to the gym I got rid of every alien thought in my mind. I tuned in to my body as though it were a musical instrument I was about to play. In the dressing room I would start thinking about training, about every body part, what I was going to do, how I was going to pump up. I would concentrate on procedure and results until my everyday problems went floating away. I knew that if I went in there concerned about bills or girls and let myself think about those things while doing bench presses, I’d only make marginal progress. I’d seen guys reading the newspaper between sets day after day, and they always looked bad. Some of them had been going through the motions of training for years, and you couldn’t tell that they had ever picked up a weight. It had been nothing more than heartless pantomime” – Arnold, The Education of a Bodybuilder

My high school weight room was a perfect example of athletes with no mind-muscle connection. Kids just throwing heavy weight around with bad form, not feeling their muscles at all. Unfortunately, the majority of swimmers are no better, just getting up and down the pool each day, unaware of what they should be feeling.

Achieving mind-in-the-muscle takes a great deal of focus and will initially make swimming more difficult. You will be engaging your muscles more fully, and you will not be used to that. It’s easier to swim mindlessly and just use brute force, but it’s also slower. When I first understood the mind-muscle con-nection I had to lower all my weights, but once I did I saw far better results.

I am also convinced that by focusing on your muscles you help to take pressure and stress off your joints, reducing the risk of injury. If you aren’t fo-cusing on your muscles, they will not be as engaged, and the work may move onto your tendons, ligaments, cartilage, or smaller rotator cuff muscles causing overuse and injury. By thinking about what muscles you are using, and focus-ing on how they feel, you can reduce the risk of injury.

The mind-muscle connection, and feel for the water, is probably the most difficult thing to express in writing because it is entirely sensory, and it is diffi-cult to teach because no drill or correction can give you this ability directly. Two people can be doing the exact same thing in the pool and have radically different experiences. Strive to be the aware swimmer.