Training and Bodybuilding: basic principles

By Dr. Dario Mirra

Training a muscle group with Bodybuilding methods does not simply mean lifting dumbbells and barbells, placing yourself under a Lat Machine and trying to pull up all the plates available (... maybe while the most beautiful of the gym is watching us),

and with all that load do two repetitions, so as to make us raise the arterial pressure to the levels of a tractor tire, finding ourselves having the face so red that it seems to be the most lightened of the equipment room; rather, it means undergoing a Work-Out that leads to exhaustion of the muscle, which impoverishes the energy reserves it has, which creates myofibrillar microlesions, which increases the flow of blood to the affected area with a stagnation of anabolic substances, in order to obtain such stress as to create a supercompensation that aims to increase muscle mass in a given district.

To achieve all this in a rational way, so to train a muscle correctly, it is necessary to have in mind different parameters, such as:

1. Muscle anatomy. The first notion to have in mind! Never say that while you are trying to train your pectoral muscle, you get caught by the room instructor to make side raises!
2. 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 the movement through the interposition to such structures of mobile elements, the joints. Thus, the skeletal muscles take advantage of these joints (joints) to set in motion 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.
3. Know how the muscle performs its movements. Based on the previous principle it is obvious that the muscle should be stressed during our training from all available angles. It is well known that when working on a muscle, hypertrophy is most likely located at the fixed point of movement; from which, to work for example the biceps brachialis muscle, it would be good to exploit its flexing features of the forearm on the arm, as happens for example in a curl with a barbell, or inverting fixed and mobile points (as far as this may be possible), performing the typical reverse grip drive.

   To take full advantage of a muscle, I repeat that we must try to use most of the actions that it can perform, in order to be able to involve the highest possible number of fibers. To take another example, let's imagine a frontal drive on the lat machine. Watching a common user of any sports center perform this exercise, it will be easy to notice that with each repetition he will bow his back and bring the bar to his chest. But if we take a look at any biomechanics book 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 generally summarize them in:

• Great backbone.
• Set of paravertebral muscles.
• Some of the motor muscles of the shoulder girdle (trapezius, rhomboid, angular of the scapula, large dentate, small pectoralis).
• Big round.
• Posterior deltoid.
• Infraspinatus.
• Brachial biceps.
• Brachioradials.
• Long head of the brachial triceps.

All these muscles, in the execution of the frontal lat machine, will perform three main movements, such as: retropulsion of the humerus, adduction of the shoulder blades and hyperextension of the column.

4. The dominance of the type of fibers that make up the trained muscle. So that they are more 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 easily understandable that it would be more correct to train it with a medium-high number of repetitions. Instead, the triceps brachialis muscle is 67% Fast Twitch type "b" (Johnson et al. 1973), so, in this case, it could be more physiological to subject it to a job with a number of average repetitions low (at least in theory).
5. Know the synergistic muscles of the movement. All the movements, from the simplest to the most complex, that we have available to move in our daily or in our Bodybuilding training, although meticulous and precise, will never involve a single muscle, but always a set of muscles that will make up those which is commonly called "kinetic chain"; from which we will have the main muscle called "agonist" to which will support other movement called "synergistic" muscles. For example in our bench press the trained muscle, and in this case agonist, will be the pectoralis major, and some of the synergistic muscles will be the deltoid and the triceps.

Conclusions

Those just mentioned are small suggestions, which will allow you to better train a muscle group according to the principles of Bodybuilding from a mechanical and physiological point of view, since, as previously explained, even an apparently simple exercise hides behind the execution of the rules, perhaps not very evident, but that make its practice effective, which would be reduced to gestures with no logic, if it were not for a rigorous theoretical knowledge.