Is Muscle Activation a Myth?

Around ten years ago this idea became popular that you must activate muscles prior to starting an activity, especially muscles that would be considered weak. In the last couple of years however, it’s come out that this isn’t really true. Muscles are either strong or they aren’t, there’s really no benefit to “turning muscles on” when they are still weak afterwards. A common example that I have heard almost endlessly would be: your glutes aren’t working, we need to “activate” them. And the next step would be to do some glute bridges or band resisted side-steps to, theoretically, turn on that muscle group.

The goal of this blog post is to talk about this idea of warming-up the body vs activating muscles vs strengthening muscles, and how I approach this today. 

Ten years ago, muscle activation was a cutting edge practice, so I adopted it as well because the information presented at the time made sense to me. Again, and especially at the time, the most common muscle group that seemingly always needed to be activated would be the glutes, with trainers and strength coaches and personal trainers alike all saying they need to be “turned on” to protect against knee injury. 

At that time we would do lots activation drills in our dynamic warmup, which is one of the things I’ve changed my mind on a bit. I don't at all believe that we are mitigating injury risk in that moment by “activating” the glutes. The muscles are just weak, and it will take time to build the strength in those muscles to actually reduce the risk for injury. 

It’s a lot easier to say that someone got hurt because they didn’t “activate” their glutes, instead of telling the truth and saying the athlete is just weak in that area. The real solution is to continue to lift weights and get stronger. That's not the solution that people want to hear, because it's not a quick fix. Long term solutions are not nearly as popular as short term ones, but you have to actually get into a long term strength training program to get permanently stronger to have the best chance of staying injury free. 

However, I'm not sure you would see a massive difference in my written warm-ups between then and now. That's what's interesting about this. The thing that has changed is the mental side, or what I'm actually saying to my players. Instead of saying we are “activating” muscles, I say that we are just getting extra reps to warm-up. I will put in glute bridges of all kinds and add in monster walks to every pre-practice warm-up. But not because I’m activating a muscle, but because these are things that make the players feel good, and they are helping strengthen those muscles. It's the extra reps that are slowly playing their part in strengthening the hips. During the season when I’m trying to strike the best possible minimum effective dose (i.e., we don’t do one rep more than needed) and a frequent game schedule, this may be the only way we are able to train these muscles, as big lifts are few and far between in-season.

For me, everything always comes back to strength. Muscles don’t need to be “activated”, they need to be strengthened. A funny thing I’ve seen over the years is that when younger coaches look at “old school” training programs prioritizing squatting, deadlifting, and lunging, they are surprised at how simple they are. They think this can’t be everything, am I missing a page? 

But there's not, it just always comes back to the fundamentals. Strength is the base and that’s what I prioritize. I’m always looking for new things to add in to help build that base of strength, but the longer I do this the more I realize that it’s about getting stronger in very basic fundamental exercises. Athlete longevity and success, I firmly believe, is about being strong and having great technique.

This whole thing reminds me of the dramatic shifts that occur in science and medicine in relatively short time periods. When I was growing up, the idea was that you were supposed to put infants on their stomachs to sleep (because if they slept on their backs they might die). By the time that I had kids, it was the exact opposite, now they were supposed to sleep on their backs (because if they sleep on their stomachs they might die!). It only took 20-30 years to completely change the idea of how an infant is supposed to sleep. And this isn’t about the semantics or intention of activating or strengthening a muscle, this is about actual life and death!

So when we come to strength training and exercise science, you must use the common sense that comes with experience because the field itself is so young. That’s as a coach or as an athlete. Athletes have a pretty good sense of what is good or bad for them and what will or won’t work for them. 

The point is that even if you’re completely new or have a ton of experience, still listen to new ideas, but think about them before you take them as law. The biggest mistake is to just completely listen to someone, without remembering that the field is very new, and it’s changing all the time. This is why the main thing that changed about my warmups is my understanding of what we're doing and why. The methods used are still fairly similar, but the intention has shifted.

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25lb Chinup PR and Newton's Second Law

When most people think about becoming stronger, the only variable often looked at is the weight on the bar, or the size of the dumbbell. After all, if you're squatting 225x5 on week 1, then 250x5 on week 3, you've gotten stronger, right? Of course...it's progressive overload at it's finest. However, what happens when adding weight to the bar simply doesn't cut it? If you bench press 200lbs for six reps one week, and then are unable to bench 200lbs for seven reps the following week....you've failed to get stronger, correct?

Not necessarily. In fact, your strength gains may have significantly increased, but you failed to realize it, and thus the fuming and fussing on the car ride home begins.

First, let me provide some video footage of my wife, Kelsey, hitting an impressive weighted chinup personal record. Here she is, on Thanksgiving morning, pulling her sternum to the bar with 45lbs dangling from her waist:

(Yes, women can do pullups. Boys, you have some work to do.)

For the longest time, Kelsey was stuck at +20lbs strapped to her waist. She couldn't seem to break that barrier. Then, in the course of only a few months, she added another 25lbs to her waist! How did she do this, you inquire? Whew, I thought you'd never ask....

She stopped grinding out her reps.

You know....the kind where you kick your feet around, pulling yourself up - or pressing the bar - slower than molasses running uphill in July.

Up until her recent training cycle (the one where she hit the chinup PR), she ALWAYS grinded out her reps. In her mind, if she wasn't adding more weight to her waist, then she wasn't getting stronger (she will admit this, too). This continued for months on end, her max chinup remaining right at a stubborn +20lbs. However, once she stopped worrying about the weight, and kept her reps clean and crisp, her chinup strength skyrocketed! She of course did this in conjunction with some intelligent programming, but that's not what I'm going to get into here.

The same thing can happen to you, whether it's your bench press, squat, deadlift, overhead press, or whatever. And you can thank Newton's Second Law for this phenomenon. For those of you who may forget high school physics, and/or are more visual learners, let me provide you a picture:

Looking at the equation, and using a bit of Algebra 1, it's easy to see that there are a few ways to increase F: one of these being increasing m while keeping a constant; the other being, increasing a while keeping m constant. If you don't know what F, m, and a stand for, then shame on you. I'll wait while you look it up.

I'm about to get my nerdification on a bit, so if you're uninterested in reading further, take home this: you can still get stronger by moving the same weight FASTER, rather than needing to add more weight to the bar. In fact, this is often the limiting factor in one's inability to continue to improve his or her strength.

Okay, for those of you that are still with me, we know that there are three primary factors that affect the phenotypic properties of muscle:

1. The Nervous System
2. Mechanical Loading
3. The Endocrine System

The nervous system is the driving force behind adaptation of our motor units (a motor unit being a motor neuron and all the muscle fibers it innervates). In fact, it is the nervous system that's responsible for determining whether your fibers are fast twitch or slow twitch.

Mechanical loading refers to moving a weight (as in a squat or bench press), and the endocrine system would be all those hormones running throughout your body.

Today, we're going to briefly glimpse at the first two on the list.

With the F=ma equation, the "F" would be the force your muscles produce, m would be the weight on the bar (or the mechanical loading), and a would be how fast you move it.

With regards to muscle fiber strength and size changes, a propelling force in inciting these desired adaptations is neural drive. The more neural drive you have to the muscle fibers, the more they develop in size and strength. Essentially, you're tapping into your high threshold motor units, the one's that have the greatest potential for size and strength.

What is one way to increase neural drive? Increase force production.You know, that big F in the equation.

Since we can't perpetually increase F by adding weight on the bar (if only, if only....), we can still cause F to go up by improving our a, the acceleration!

More acceleration = more force output = more neural drive to the muscles = more chances of the opposite sex wanting to hang out with you. Yes, that is scientific fact.

All this boils down to is that you need to measure improvement not only by the weight the bar, but also by how fast you move it.

If I could call out one of the greatest mistakes I see in the average gym goer, it is that they are constantly grinding out reps in their attempts to get their sexification on. And, even worse, they'll hit failure, missing reps and crashing the bar onto the safety pins. This will only fry your nervous system and make you weak. The strongest lifters in the world never miss reps. I think they must be on to something, no?

Stealing an example from Roger Lawson, continuing to grind out your reps (i.e. moving the bar slowww and coming close to failure) is akin to continually punching the accelerator and slamming the brakes at each traffic light. You know, like that hilarious scene from Meet the Parents.

If your body is the analogous to the car, and your nervous system is comparable to the engine, what do you think will happen to your performance in and out of the gym? Not positive things, that's for sure.

Going back to Kelsey's example, she spent a solid few months staying far away from failure, ensuring that her reps were always clean and crisp. By improving her acceleration, she was enhancing her nervous system via improved force production, staying fresh by avoiding slow reps, and eventually added 25lbs to her chinup. Easy peasy.