Muscle Activation and Neuro-Muscular Pathways

Part of a good warm up should encourage your muscles to contract effectively and to promote a healthy and efficient movement pattern. Jumping straight in to your routine can sacrifice potential performance, risk injury and be detrimental to your movement patterns and posture.

A prime example is the lat pull down. Most people new to resistance training will (and should) include this exercise in their program. When executed correctly it can improve posture, improve your core strength and help balance out many of the detrimental every day activities that just about all of us participate in far too often such as driving, using computers and sitting in general.

While the pectoralis muscles play a part in this exercise, these are usually over trained and chronically shortened in the average gym user. Without actively contracting the muscles of the upper back, these already dominant muscles will take over the movement and exacerbate weaknesses in the posterior chain muscles by pulling the shoulders forward. You can help reduce the role these opposing muscles play in the exercise by performing static stretches before and in between each set (assuming you are not going to be actively training these muscles on that same day). That is to say perform static stretches on your pectoral muscles: not your lats.

Many novices (and many more experienced lifters) I have seen in the gym have difficulty recruiting the muscles in their upper back that will draw their shoulders down and back: the rhomboids and lats. when shown correct movement patterns they are physically incapable of recruiting these muscles. This can be seen as the shoulders are elevated and forward, the elbows are in front of the body and the chin is slightly tucked.

This is partly due to physical weakness as well as a lack of neuro-muscular connectivity. simply put, through lack of use, our brains do not have the neuro-muscular pathways to activate those particular muscles that help keep the chest lifted, the shoulders down and the shoulder blades retracted.

The easiest way to initiate this activation is to set yourself up on the lat pull down machine, grasping the bar with a wide overhand grip. tightening the core and ensuring that your body does not move whatsoever. The idea is to pull the bar down as far as possible without bending your elbows. It helps if you focus on pulling your shoulders down and back, your shoulder blades together, keeping your chest lifted all while maintaining as much distance between your ears and your shoulders as possible. You can facillitate the recruitment of these muscles by having someone touch physically them. If you have someone else place their fingers inside your shoulder blades and gently (as though testing for a ripe avacado) pull them together, it can assist in developing the neuro-muscular pathways as your nerve endings send signals to the brain saying "hey, something's going on over here" to which your brain can reply "oh..... those muscles need to contract".

The exact same process can be carried out executing a seated row. Once again being sure to tighten the core and keeping the elbows locked- move the back backwards by retracting the shoulders and shoulder blades instead of pulling with the biceps.

Using wrist straps can help to relax the tension in the arms and focus more on the shoulders and back. In general, it is important not to become reliant on using lifting straps as they will greatly compromise your grip strength in the long run.

Muscular activation can be applied to many exercises in the gym (eg. hamstring curls, glute bridging and GHD extensions), ensuring you are recruiting all of the important muscles in any lift will help keep you safe and strong. The Rhomboids are simply the most common muscle to be underdeveloped and underused in the average gym user.