We love making fun of the overly serious meatheads curling by the rack while they’re violently staring at their arms.
However, those intense meatheads may be on to something. For decades, bodybuilders have advocated for the mind muscle connection which refers to aiming your focus towards the targeted muscle you’re training. So if you’re doing barbell curls, the idea is to think deeply hard about your biceps as they contract and lengthen.
Nothing else should cross your mind during the set. Not even Carrie Underwood in a sundress or Chris Hemsworth without a shirt.
Some people claim the mind muscle connection is just bro-science and isn’t a real thing.
However, modern research shows the mind muscle connection is more than just bro-science. It’s actual science. It can be defined as the neural connection between your mind and muscle tissue.
As cool and fitting as the word mind muscle connection sounds, in studies, scientists use the term internal focus or internal cuing referring to drawing attention internally. Same meaning, just fancier verbiage.
Conversely, the term external focus is use to refer to focusing on something related to the lifter’s environment.
Examples of internal cues would be to squeeze your pecs together at the top of a fly or to squeeze your glutes till they explode at the end of a hip thrust.
Examples of external cues would be to rip the bar off the floor during a deadlift or to explode the bar off your chest on a bench press.
So while internal focus refers to the mind muscle connection, We’ll need to discuss external focus really fast to get a full understanding on this entire topic.
External focus is superior for motor learning, force production, and movement efficiency (1-6,18).
Telling a powerlifter to thrust his hips through during a heavy deadlift is more effective than yelling out “glutes” like some powerlifting coaches do.
Telling a sprinter to run as if his crazy ex-girlfriend is chasing them is more effective than telling them to focus on contracting their hamstrings every stride (12).
This is why from a pure strength and endurance performance standpoint, external focus has repeatedly been shown to be better than internal focus.
So far, the mind muscle connection doesn’t look too credible, but remember the mind muscle connection proposed effects are on hypertrophy not strength. Let’s take a closer look at other studies that paints a more accurate picture.
This first study compared internal vs external cues on muscle activation during light bench pressing at different tempos (7).
It found that internal cuing didn’t improve muscle activation during explosive benching, likely because muscle activation is already increasing during explosive reps (8).
It did find increased muscle activation when performing slower reps likely to make up for the decreased muscle activation when concentric tempo is intentionally slowed. This may indicate the mind-muscle can be useful when you’re forced to train with a consciously slow concentric like for rehabbing purposes.
Muscle growth wasn’t measured, but assuming both conditions have the same failure point, muscle activation is irrelevant and growth would likely be similar (9).
Still, external cuing was sufficient for maximal muscle activation. This is because your brain’s control center aka the motor cortex is extremely good at it’s job (19). You tell it what to do and it’ll find the most efficient way to do it.
So if you tell it to bench a certain way, it’ll optimize the recruitment pattern. Telling it how to recruit muscles by consciously trying to focus more on certain muscles results in unfavorable recruitment patterns, at least from a performance standpoint (13,22).
In addition, telling somebody to pick something up without rounding their spine (external focus) is better than telling somebody to use their legs (internal focus) (20).
In line with this rationale, Calatayud et al found focusing on the pecs or triceps only had a minor increase in muscle activation (14). In addition, this effect decreases as the weight gets heavier until 80% 1-RM where it becomes nullified.
In other words, with a heavy enough weight, the mind-muscle connection is completely useless even if you may feel further sensation from it (15).
This next study compared internal vs external cues on muscle activation during leg extensions (10).
It found that given the same performance, muscle activation was higher with internal cues.
This reinforces that external cues are king for strength as the same performance was achieved with less muscle activation.
However, this study didn’t measure muscle growth or failure points, so our best conclusion is internal cuing would be better for hypertrophy in isolation exercises if load/reps/intensity are limited like quick home workouts for example.
The problem is nobody trains like this. Isolation exercises are usually trained close to or up to failure to maximize hypertrophy, so we’re left wondering if utilizing the mind muscle connection on the way towards those same final reps is really worth sacrificing external performance.
Furthermore, this study did reveal you can’t preferentially increase muscle activation in the vastus medialis as other quad muscles increased alongside. This means you can’t use the mind muscle connection to boost activation of just one quad muscle without others increasing activation as well.
Another study can fill in more of the narrative for us. Fujita et al found the mind-muscle connection limited performance and didn’t improve muscle activation on seated rows done to failure (16). The researchers even touched the lat muscles explaining the cue. Thus so far, the mind-muscle connection seems to be pretty limited for both isolation and compound exercises.
Finally, this last study gives us some concrete answers on muscle growth and not just muscle activation (11). In untrained lifters, it compared muscle growth after 8 weeks of a training program consisting of biceps curls and leg extensions, utilizing multiple sets to failure, but unfortunately, performance wasn’t tracked. One group was given purely internal cues and one group only got external cues for every rep.
Volume and effort were matched between groups, but performance was not recorded.
Strength gains favored the external cuing group, but hypertrophy favored the internal cuing group especially in the arms.
This leads me to conclude, the mind muscle connection may have additional muscle growing benefits at least in biceps curls.
The authors used untrained lifters to prevent a trained lifter from subconsciously using the mind-muscle connection when they’re only supposed to focus on external cuing. Other research shows this may not be true though (17).
In addition, with untrained lifters on biceps curls, using internal cues on non-machine isolation exercises may have improved their technique or tempo. This explains why the leg extensions didn’t see any extra quad growth while the biceps did.
In line with this, another study found beginners can grow their biceps sufficiently without any load, but simply hard flexing (21). So at best, the mind muscle connection is necessary when you’re a beginner without sufficient loading.
Based on the above data, here my conclusions:
L;, Schücker L;Parrington. “Thinking About Your Running Movement Makes You Less Efficient: Attentional Focus Effects on Running Economy and Kinematics.” Journal of Sports Sciences, U.S. National Library of Medicine, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30307374/.
DE;, Bredin SS;Dickson DB;Warburton. “Effects of Varying Attentional Focus on Health-Related Physical Fitness Performance.” Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism = Physiologie Appliquee, Nutrition Et Metabolisme, U.S. National Library of Medicine, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23438227/.
Calatayud J;Vinstrup J;Jakobsen MD;Sundstrup E;Brandt M;Jay K;Colado JC;Andersen LL; “Importance of Mind-Muscle Connection During Progressive Resistance Training.” European Journal of Applied Physiology, U.S. National Library of Medicine, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26700744/.
Paoli A;Mancin L;Saoncella M;Grigoletto D;Pacelli FQ;Zamparo P;Schoenfeld BJ;Marcolin G; “Mind-Muscle Connection: Effects of Verbal Instructions on Muscle Activity During Bench Press Exercise.” European Journal of Translational Myology, U.S. National Library of Medicine, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31354928/.
Rafael A. Fujita, Nilson R. S. Silva. “Mind–Muscle Connection: Limited Effect of Verbal Instructions on Muscle Activity in a Seated Row Exercise – Rafael A. Fujita, Nilson R. S. Silva, Bruno L. S. Bedo, Paulo R. P. Santiago, Paulo R. V. Gentil, Matheus M. Gomes.” SAGE Journals, journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0031512520926369.
Calatayud J;Vinstrup J;Jakobsen MD;Sundstrup E;Colado JC;Andersen LL; “Mind-Muscle Connection Training Principle: Influence of Muscle Strength and Training Experience During a Pushing Movement.” European Journal of Applied Physiology, U.S. National Library of Medicine, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28500415/.
Chan, Alan, et al. “Effects of Attentional Focus and Dual-Tasking on Conventional Deadlift Performance in Experienced Lifters.” International Journal of Kinesiology and Sports Science, www.journals.aiac.org.au/index.php/IJKSS/article/view/5665.
Oby, Emily R, et al. “Movement Representation in the Primary Motor Cortex and Its Contribution to Generalizable EMG Predictions.” Journal of Neurophysiology, American Physiological Society, Feb. 2013, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3567392/.
Beach, Tyson A.C., et al. “Using Verbal Instructions to Influence Lifting Mechanics – Does the Directive ‘Lift with Your Legs, Not Your Back’ Attenuate Spinal Flexion?” Journal of Electromyography and Kinesiology, Elsevier, 31 Oct. 2017, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1050641117300044.
Counts BR;Buckner SL;Dankel SJ;Jessee MB;Mattocks KT;Mouser JG;Laurentino GC;Loenneke JP; “The Acute and Chronic Effects of ‘NO LOAD’ Resistance Training.” Physiology & Behavior, U.S. National Library of Medicine, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27329807/.
Coratella. “The Effects of Verbal Instructions on Lower Limb Muscles’ Excitation in Back-Squat.” Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, U.S. National Library of Medicine, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33170116/.
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