Focus is one of the most important factors in the success of a bodybuilder, as important as nutrition or genetics. You need to be 100% focused on your workout or you are wasting your time.
There are two components of focus, what you do during your set and what you do between your sets. When you are doing your set, your mind will be on two things and two things only:
1.thinking about what muscles are working
2.trying to 'feel' the muscle (more on this later)
During the set, no doing anything else. No talking, no looking around, no thinking about what exercise you are going to do next. Your mind is 100% focused on the set you are doing right now. Lets talk a little about the first item, what muscles are working. When a joint is rotating, a muscle is working. If two joints are rotating then two or more muscles are working. If you are doing biceps and your shoulder is rotating as well as your elbow then you are exercising your shoulder as well as your bicep. By constantly thinking about what joints are rotating and what muscles are working you make sure you are focused 100% on the muscle you are working out.
Now lets talk about what you do between sets:
•think about our last set. Did we meet our rep goal? Did we use good form? Did it feel good?
•think about our next set. How many reps will we do? How will it feel? What is our reward if we achieve the goal or the punishment should we fail?
•visualize. Visualize how we will accomplish our goal, close your eyes and see what it will look like and how it will feel. There are many good sports programs out there to help will visualization, check them out
•practice muscle control, this will help us to 'feel' the exercise while we are doing it. A car with loose spark plug wires doesnt develop much power because the anemic spark cant fully ignite the gas, similarly, if your brain doesnt have a good connection to your muscles you cant contract them fully. The idea behind these muscle control drills is to improve the connection between your brain and the muscle so you can contract precisely the muscles you want and contract them 100%. One of the early great bodybuilders back in the late 1800's was Sandow and he had amazing muscle control. He came up with control exercises that are still used to this day in various reincarnation. Sandow had amazing ab control, if you want to see a modern day example of a bodybuilder with great ab control, check out youtube user sixpackbn who graciously gave permission for me to include his clip in my video
Tags: home workout exercise bodybuilding bodybulider flex muscle control ab vacuum pec jump
