THE IDEA IS TO WORK THROUGH THE
COMPLETE RANGE OF MOTION OF THE
MOVEMENT, EXTREMELY SLOWLY, WHILE
FOCUSING ONLY ON ‘GETTING IN TOUCH’ WITH
THE MUSCLES YOU’RE ABOUT TO TRAIN.
Go “GIT” It
One of the most important
aspects of successfully
stimulating hypertrophy is
being able to truly feel a
muscle at work. If you’re not
able to establish a very strong
connection between the
mind and the muscle you’re
targeting, you more than likely
are engaging other body parts
and most certainly failing to
exhaust the maximum amount
of motor unit pools. This in
turn can cause any muscle
to lag behind.
Several years ago I
developed a technique I call
GIT, or the “get in touch”
principle. It involves practicing
the exercise you’re about to
do but without holding any
actual weight. In other words,
the idea is to work through
the complete range of motion
of the movement, extremely
slowly, while focusing only on
“getting in touch” with the
muscles you’re about to train.
The goal is to feel every inch of
the range of motion, from
stretch to contraction and back
to stretch, in order to build a
profound connection between
your nervous system and
muscles. That way, you’ll feel the
exercise working more efficiently
and also recruit as many muscle
fibers as possible with each
repetition. I recommend doing
eight to 10 reps in this manner
before any movement you
generally have trouble making a
powerful connection with, using
a tempo of 5/2/5/2 (five-second
eccentric, or negative, contrac-
tion; two seconds at midpoint;
five-second concentric, or
positive, contraction; two
seconds at peak contraction).
If you do it correctly, you’ll likely
get an intense pump before you
even touch a weight, and you’ll
definitely get far more benefit
out of the actual movement itself
once you hit your work sets.
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