Post by carruthersjam on Aug 19, 2007 5:33:20 GMT -8
Concentration increases muscle stimulation:
Siff believes that a major reason many bodybuilders may not have the success they seek is they lack mental discipline in their workouts. "Bodybuilders will spend much of their time looking at the women in their gym and themselves posing in the mirror. Consider a wild animal's behaviour prior to a bunt, or when trying to escape from a hunt, when it uses its ability to totally focus for prolonged periods. Likewise, you want to achieve total concentration in every exercise, focusing all your senses into it. This leads to greater tension in the muscle, greater nervous activation."
Henk K:
I do not believe in mental coaching: every physical workout is a mental workout, otherwise I'd be coaching muscles only and I would need a psychologist for the brain only.
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21learn.org/publ/abbott_speech.html
We've tended to think of ourselves and our behaviour in rational logical terms, but our emotions more often direct the decision. Emotion drives attention, which drives learning, memory, and behaviour - and so emotion is the triggering mechanism for just about everything we do. Far more neural fibers project from our brain's relatively small emotional center into the large rational/logical cortex than the reverse.
Our brain's complex collection of neural networks process our cognitive activity. Individual networks that process specific functions combine to process more complex functions. Several dozen neurotransmitter and hormonal systems provide the key chemical substrate of this marvelous information-processing system.
Here's my story. When I was about 10 years old my parents employed a man to do odd jobs. Old MacFadgen had served his apprenticeship as a carpenter in the Navy in the 1890s. Once he qualified, though, the Navy didn't need any more carpenters. So he spent his entire career shoveling coal into the boilers of battleships. One thing kept him sane. In his free time, he would go up into the shadow of the gun turrets with little bits of wood and his chisels and whittle away to his heart's content. He was a brilliant carver.
Each Friday evening, when he had finished his jobs, he would show me these little wooden figureheads he had made all those years before. I became hungry to do the same thing. "If you want to learn how to carve, you'll first have to learn how to sharpen a chisel," he said. I nodded, and for several weeks I learnt to sharpen chisels, which is not an easy task.
Then he produced some strange bits of wood with the most awfully contorted grain. "You'll never learn to carve unless you know how to work the grain of the wood," he said. And so for weeks that is just what I did. Then finally he said, "I think you're ready to start carving now." Then he let me go. By the time I was 13, I was quite a good wood carver, and then I went off to a conventional boarding Public School.
Woodwork, never alone carving, was not on the formal curriculum!
In those days you could not go to Oxbridge without Latin. My Latin teacher, however, was even more bored with Latin than I was. He spent all his time telling us how he had won the war single-handed in his silly little tank in the African desert! I failed Latin three times. I had six weeks to go until I could take the exam for the last time. If I failed I would not have got to University, and I wouldn't be here now.
Then the school carpenter, a menial employee not entitled to enter the common room, came and congratulated me. "You have been chosen to represent the UK as a schoolboy woodcarver at an international exhibition at Olympia," he said. My morale soared, but then it crashed, because woodcarving, unlike debating or rugby, was not recognized by the school.
If I was a better woodcarver than anyone else, I rationalized, why couldn't I learn Latin? The answer appeared simple - I wasn't in charge. So that afternoon I went to my Latin teacher and explained that I wouldn't come to any more of his lessons. I would teach myself. For six weeks nobody knew what to do with me; but that didn't matter. I memorized vast chunks of Caesar's Gallic War and Virgil's Aeneid. Night after night I lay awake testing myself on conjugations and declensions. And of course I passed Latin. Six months later I had forgotten most of it...but I still woodcarve!
You see learning has to do with a hunger to make sense of something. The whole brain, including the emotions, has to be engaged. If you separate emotion from intellect you court disaster.
Abadzhiev noted the following:
" In order to achieve this higher level of adrenaline release, we used to do Monday, Wednesday and Friday, training sessions in front of an audience, which resembled the situation of a real competition, when you have the lights, the audience, the crowd, the judges, and the
emotional factor also plays a very important role, it stimulates the
release of adrenaline. So you performed up to your maximum three
times a week, almost in competition circumstances, which releases the
adrenaline needed, which makes this whole mechanism function, which
enables a certain muscle group to grow and perform better."
Siff believes that a major reason many bodybuilders may not have the success they seek is they lack mental discipline in their workouts. "Bodybuilders will spend much of their time looking at the women in their gym and themselves posing in the mirror. Consider a wild animal's behaviour prior to a bunt, or when trying to escape from a hunt, when it uses its ability to totally focus for prolonged periods. Likewise, you want to achieve total concentration in every exercise, focusing all your senses into it. This leads to greater tension in the muscle, greater nervous activation."
Henk K:
I do not believe in mental coaching: every physical workout is a mental workout, otherwise I'd be coaching muscles only and I would need a psychologist for the brain only.
==================
21learn.org/publ/abbott_speech.html
We've tended to think of ourselves and our behaviour in rational logical terms, but our emotions more often direct the decision. Emotion drives attention, which drives learning, memory, and behaviour - and so emotion is the triggering mechanism for just about everything we do. Far more neural fibers project from our brain's relatively small emotional center into the large rational/logical cortex than the reverse.
Our brain's complex collection of neural networks process our cognitive activity. Individual networks that process specific functions combine to process more complex functions. Several dozen neurotransmitter and hormonal systems provide the key chemical substrate of this marvelous information-processing system.
Here's my story. When I was about 10 years old my parents employed a man to do odd jobs. Old MacFadgen had served his apprenticeship as a carpenter in the Navy in the 1890s. Once he qualified, though, the Navy didn't need any more carpenters. So he spent his entire career shoveling coal into the boilers of battleships. One thing kept him sane. In his free time, he would go up into the shadow of the gun turrets with little bits of wood and his chisels and whittle away to his heart's content. He was a brilliant carver.
Each Friday evening, when he had finished his jobs, he would show me these little wooden figureheads he had made all those years before. I became hungry to do the same thing. "If you want to learn how to carve, you'll first have to learn how to sharpen a chisel," he said. I nodded, and for several weeks I learnt to sharpen chisels, which is not an easy task.
Then he produced some strange bits of wood with the most awfully contorted grain. "You'll never learn to carve unless you know how to work the grain of the wood," he said. And so for weeks that is just what I did. Then finally he said, "I think you're ready to start carving now." Then he let me go. By the time I was 13, I was quite a good wood carver, and then I went off to a conventional boarding Public School.
Woodwork, never alone carving, was not on the formal curriculum!
In those days you could not go to Oxbridge without Latin. My Latin teacher, however, was even more bored with Latin than I was. He spent all his time telling us how he had won the war single-handed in his silly little tank in the African desert! I failed Latin three times. I had six weeks to go until I could take the exam for the last time. If I failed I would not have got to University, and I wouldn't be here now.
Then the school carpenter, a menial employee not entitled to enter the common room, came and congratulated me. "You have been chosen to represent the UK as a schoolboy woodcarver at an international exhibition at Olympia," he said. My morale soared, but then it crashed, because woodcarving, unlike debating or rugby, was not recognized by the school.
If I was a better woodcarver than anyone else, I rationalized, why couldn't I learn Latin? The answer appeared simple - I wasn't in charge. So that afternoon I went to my Latin teacher and explained that I wouldn't come to any more of his lessons. I would teach myself. For six weeks nobody knew what to do with me; but that didn't matter. I memorized vast chunks of Caesar's Gallic War and Virgil's Aeneid. Night after night I lay awake testing myself on conjugations and declensions. And of course I passed Latin. Six months later I had forgotten most of it...but I still woodcarve!
You see learning has to do with a hunger to make sense of something. The whole brain, including the emotions, has to be engaged. If you separate emotion from intellect you court disaster.
Abadzhiev noted the following:
" In order to achieve this higher level of adrenaline release, we used to do Monday, Wednesday and Friday, training sessions in front of an audience, which resembled the situation of a real competition, when you have the lights, the audience, the crowd, the judges, and the
emotional factor also plays a very important role, it stimulates the
release of adrenaline. So you performed up to your maximum three
times a week, almost in competition circumstances, which releases the
adrenaline needed, which makes this whole mechanism function, which
enables a certain muscle group to grow and perform better."
