WHY BIG ISN’T ALWAYS BETTER
Leave the meatheads to it. Drop out of the arms race and you can make your training more intelligent, effective and enjoyable
Wanting bigger muscles is entirely natural. They’re not necessarily bad or unhealthy – as long as they’re not acquired through pharmaceutical means. But the question worth asking is, why? Do you covet size because you want to be stronger? Play your sport better? Or just look good on the beach? Either way, there are more effective routes to achieving your goal.
For example, men confuse wanting to get bigger with getting leaner; often they already have enough muscle – it’s just obscured by fat. What they really need to do is add HIIT or a few steady-state sessions to their weekly bro split. Burning more calories with cardio will lower your body fat, dial up your definition and help to bring your muscle mass to the fore.
Thankfully, there’s an emerging trend for training as a more holistic endeavour. If you’re still gunning it purely for aesthetics, you’re doing it wrong. Not to mention the confused conflation between size and strength 1 . Yes, a bigger muscle will be a stronger one, to an extent. But strength is largely neuromuscular; it’s about your brain connecting to your muscles in the most efficient way possible. Subjects in an Ohio University study who visualised exercising 11 minutes a day for a month significantly increased their strength without lifting so much as a finger.
According to neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert, the reason that humans evolved large brains was to execute complex movements and ultimately survive. In turn, complex movements have been shown to reverse age-related shrinking of the hippocampus, which is responsible for memory. It’s a reminder that you should be learning new skills – not endlessly repping biceps curls. Trading isolation moves for mastering a muscle-up on the rings is a fantastic way to recruit more lean mass, grow your brain’s grey matter and show off in the park 2 . A training routine that benefits both body and brain will not only increase longevity, but your healthspan, too.
As mentioned, another training ‘why’ is, increasingly, performance. However, from the gym equipment companies down to the punters working out, the fitness industry generally takes an overly simplistic, muscle-first approach. Say you’re a rugby player and want to grow your glutes so you can sprint faster – you do squats. But when you run, your feet are leaving the floor at a rapid pace, not glued to it. If you want your muscles to react in the right way, you need to train the specific movements. To move faster on the sports field, try plyometric hopping and move through three planes of motion: forward, to the sides and in rotation.
The performance-driven muscle I’m advocating also benefits from being more injury resistant, more mobile – and more attractive 3 . The rigid and short muscles of a bodybuilder do not lend themselves to long-term athleticism, so drop the bionic, ‘one more rep’ mentality. Listening to your body is far more important than hammering it – unless you’re a physique competitor and it’s your source of income, of course. Otherwise, why put yourself through all that for the sake of a few extra pounds? It’s not big and it’s not clever.
“Bodybuilders’ rigid, short muscles do not lend themselves to long-term athleticism”