You’ve already made the investment 4: Take investment advice from your smart muscles, not your show muscles

It’s time to start training those smart muscles rather than those show muscles! But, wait that is just an expression right? There aren’t actually muscles that are smarter than other muscles? Surely muscles can’t have varying levels of intelligence?? Actually, in a way, they certainly can, but for the most part when we speak of training smart muscle v. show muscle we are speaking of training from the neurological perspective. There are a lot of interlacing factors that brought about the use of the term “smart muscle”. Too keep it simple, we call it training “smart muscle” because it is the smart way to train, because the neurological system is the smartest part of your body and that’s where we want more of our focus.

However, interestingly enough there are indeed muscles that are, in a way, “smarter” than the rest, and addressing these muscles in specific coordinated efforts is also a major part of training for functionality and performance. These muscles have more neurological sensory feedback mechanisms than the other muscles in your body. Their activation level, their length, and their position on the body relative to a joint’s position in space during gross human movement dictate specific lines of communication to the rest of the body. Based on these factors they are constantly sending sensory feedback to the spine’s reflex arc, the brain’s movement control centers, as well as to all the less neurologically gifted musculature. All of this activity reflexively influences how those other groups of muscles will activate, move and stabilize joints during our movements. In a sense these muscles are Lieutenants in our master command center. Neglect of these muscles will directly limit the performance and functionality of all the other muscles in the body when we attempt dynamic and strenuous movement… or any movement for that matter. We just feel the effects that much more when the movements are strenuous or challenging in nature.

These smart muscles are muscles that movement scientists refer to as having more proprioceptive responsibility. Big word I know, prepare yourself, we are about to get nerdy for a moment here. Proprioception is our ability to sense where our joints are in three dimensional space as well as what angles they are working through at any given moment as well as how much length, tension, and activity each muscle and muscle group is producing during any particular moment. This is called proprioceptive feedback. It is a neurologic sensory feedback loop that originates in our own muscles, ligaments, tendons, and joint capsules that continually relays this stream of data to our central command center. This allows the nervous system to reactively adjust the signals it sends to our muscles while we move and while we project and absorb forces through our bodies.

Examples of these so called smart muscles are the deep rotatores and intertransversaii muscles of the spine, the serratus anterior and the coracobrachialis of the shoulder. (site studies, add pictures). These muscles cannot be effectively challenged while sitting on a machine! Also, these tend to be deeper muscles, the serratus anterior is the only one that really pokes out from underneath the superficial layers of our show muscles (picture). So it is easy for people to ignore and forget about their very crucial existence. You want your back and shoulders to stop hurting, or avoid their inevitable strength and function sapping ache? You need to learn how to appropriately challenge these muscles in such a way that they are operating with all your other muscles in an efficient and healthy manner. Training on machines actually makes them weaker! This creates an unnerving (no pun intended) neurological imbalance in your movement.

Are you googling how to work out your corcobrachialis yet? You are aren’t you? Stop it! Remember training smart muscle is not about isolation techniques! You can’t effectively train the proprioceptively rich muscles individually, they need to be taught how help your nervous system manage the entire system in the appropriate manner. Otherwise you will be dumbing down your smart muscles rather than making them smarter. Train your smart muscles to be smarter by appropriately training them to help manage the system and the rest of your body and musculature will get smarter and stronger in suit.

Like everything with the body the smart muscle training concepts are much more complicated than this and involve many more variables than the examples given, but we will keep it at that for now. I just want to start wetting your palate of understanding. In our next installment we will introduce and break down the other side of the smart muscle coin. Stabilizing muscles v. prime mover muscles, and how once again conventional wisdom is not quite in tangent with reality.