The beginning and end of pain and pleasure are in the brain as is the progress of your exercise.

Let me start with an example. When you burn your fingers, you feel the burn on your fingers. However, if you prevent the nerves from sending the signals from your fingers to your brain, you won’t feel the pain. The pain is actually felt in the brain. This is true for most of our sensations.

A clear signal to and from your brain will increase or decrease the impact of your exercise. This is one of the reasons it takes a lot of reps to master a technique. Talent explains how fast or slow you can master something. But it does not eliminate the need for repetition.

Repetition with proper form is essential to getting results from your exercise activities. However, learning proper form is not for weekend warriors and casual fitness enthusiasts. This is the realm of true athletes.

If you want to have the body of an athlete, you have to act like an athlete. Master the correct form. Part of this mastery is cleaning, preparing, and developing the pathways between the brain and the muscles. Some call this developing muscle memory. Since your brain works with images, the clearer the image, the easier it is for your brain to send the correct signal to your muscles. The result of a clear image is sharp movements.

Clear, sharp images have many parts. One part has defined edges. This is not the time for artistic blurs and smoothing filters. You need a sharp image with well-defined edges of the exercise set in your brain.

What does this mean precisely?

You must understand and control the beginning and end of the movements related to each exercise, with precision. Your movements must be sharp. Remember crisp is not fast. But we talk about that later. On a bench press, with your elbows directly under your hands, when the barbell touches your chest, your elbows are slightly lower than your shoulders. This position engages your pecs. Your brain sends the signal to your pecs to prepare for the lift.

With a barbell, you can no longer lower your hands as the barbell touches your chest. But with dumbbells you can go too low and transfer the load to your delts and overstretch your pecs. Your brain may send a signal to your pecs to relax, which is the opposite of what you want.

At the top of the movement, as long as you keep your chest up and your shoulder blades retracted, you’ll achieve a full pec contraction when you straighten your elbows. However, most people have a wobbly end to their bench press. They continue to press the bar down as far as they can by hollowing out the chest and allowing the shoulder blades to spread apart. This wobbly end not only reduces pec contraction, it also creates instability and risks injuring your shoulder. The crisp ending is when your elbow straightens but your shoulder blades stay back. When you follow this step, your bench press always ends in the same place.

Holding a picture of a clear start and finish in your mind will increase the impact of the exercise and the results you will achieve. It will increase your strength and reduce the chance of injury. What more can you ask? Visit http://x5fitness.com for more details.

©2010 Copyright – Vishy Dadsetan.