Ep. #943: How to Get Stronger With Remote Voluntary Contraction

Good morning, afternoon, evening, whatever the case may be, I’m Mike Matthews. This is Muscle For Life. Thank you for joining me today to learn about remote voluntary contraction, which sounds like technical mumbo jumbo, but is actually a pretty simple concept to understand and very practical. You will be able to immediately use this if you are not already to perform better in the gym.

Thank you. Like today or tomorrow, whenever your next workout is and what’s more, you will be able to use this regardless of your programming and you will not have to make any programming changes. You can keep doing the exercises that you always do and train exactly the way that you are training. But by including this remote voluntary contraction technique in your training, you are going to be stronger before we get into it.

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All right, so what is remote voluntary contraction? To understand RVC, as I’m going to refer to it, you must first understand something that scientists call concurrent activation potentiation, or CAP. Now, CAP refers to the increased force you can generate in one muscle due to simultaneously contracting another muscle.

Otherwise inactive muscle somewhere else in your body. So in other words, it explains the phenomenon whereby you can be a little bit stronger in one exercise for one muscle group when you tense other muscles in your body. So for example, you might’ve noticed that clenching your jaw muscles helps you get an extra rep on the bench press or driving your feet into the floor can help you get an extra rep on your bench press.

These unrelated muscle contractions are called remote voluntary contractions, and their role in increasing performance was first discovered all the way back in the 1880s by a Hungarian physician named Erno Jendrassik, probably mispronounced his name. A little bit, but that’s the American way of saying it, at least.

Now, Jendrasek, he realized that if a patient clenched their teeth, flexed their fingers into hooks and interlocked their hooked hands in front of them, they could improve the strength of their patellar reflex, which is the reflex that’s triggered when you hit below somebody’s knee, if that reflex was otherwise weak or missing.

And since then, in the intervening century plus, multiple studies have shown that Jendrasek was on to something that doing things like clenching your teeth or gripping your hands as hard as you can, or using the Valsalva maneuver when you lift weights, which is a breathing technique to provide a lot of core stability.

And if you don’t know what it is and are not sure if you are doing it in your weightlifting, I would recommend heading over to legionathletics. com and searching for Valsalva, V A L S A L V A and checking out the article that I wrote on it. There’s probably also a podcast in the search results if you would rather listen to me explain it, but it is a very useful resource.

Weightlifting technique. So anyway, multiple studies have shown that doing these things helps you generate more strength and power in many different muscle groups in your body. And that’s probably why you’ve heard weightlifters and particularly powerlifters and strongmen say that they squeeze the barbell as hard as they can when they are performing exercises like the squat, deadlift, bench press, and.

Overhead press, even though the grip muscles are not prime movers in any of those exercises. And of course, the same thing goes with any exercise period, even if it’s a machine exercise or a dumbbell exercise, if you grip the machine handles or if you grip the dumbbells as hard as you possibly can. You will be a little bit stronger, and this is also why it’s a mistake when personal trainers tell their clients to not tense up or to keep breathing when they are lifting weights.

In truth, tensing up is exactly what you want to do when you are lifting weights, especially when you are doing a lot of free weight training. Lifting doing free weight exercises, and one of the reasons for this is the benefits of remote voluntary contraction. Now safety is another point, particularly in an exercise like the squat or the deadlift or the overhead press.

You want to have a very solid and stable body. Core and therefore solid and stable torso and if you are trying to breathe throughout every rep just breathe freely that is going to be impossible instead again I recommend that you check out the Valsalva maneuver and you do that when you are trying At least deadlifting, squatting, and overhead pressing, and you will probably find that you are a little bit stronger and you feel a little bit more stable with it on the bench press, even though it’s not really a point of safety there now, why does this work?

Why does remote voluntary contraction improve performance? Researchers are not entirely sure. Studies do show, though, that the most likely reason that RVC increases the amount of force your muscles can produce is by positively influencing brain and central nervous system function, primarily through two mechanisms called motor cortical overflow and inhibition of presynaptic inhibition.

And that’s basically. Fancy science talk for saying that contracting muscles in one part of your body seems to prime your brain for contracting muscles in other parts of the body. The part of your brain that is responsible for making your body move the way you want it to is the motor cortex, and that is divided into different regions that control different areas of your body, although all regions are interconnected to some degree.

And that overlap between regions means that when one region is firing as it does when you perform an RVC, the activity can flow into other areas of the motor cortex and prime those regions to fire as well or to fire more efficiently. And when this happens, the central nervous system rewires itself, so to speak, to allow the release of neurotransmitters that increase the amount of force.

Your muscles can produce so a helpful metaphor here is to think of the motor cortex like an air traffic control room for bodily movement with a number of people sitting at computers and each of them responsible for a different portion of the. Air traffic, a different portion of your body. And while each person is primarily concerned with their own territory, so to speak, they can also communicate with each other and coordinate their efforts.

And when it’s time to contract your hand, for instance, the teams that are responsible for your legs and back and chest might become more alert. In case they need to contract as well. And then when they do need to contract, because let’s say you are doing the bench press, they can contract more effectively generating more force.

Now, how big of a difference can this make in your training? It’s not going to be a huge difference. It’s not going to be night and day, but clenching your teeth or bracing your abs, like you are about to get. Punched in the stomach, that’s a good way to think about it and gripping the bar or the dumbbell or the machine as hard as you can.

It can make a noticeable difference in your performance. For example, in one study that was conducted by scientists at Marquette University, researchers found that when participants clenched their jaw, gripped the barbell as hard as they could to think about it. And pulled it down into their traps and performed the Valsalva maneuver, they increased the amount of force they could produce while performing the back squat by up to 23%.

Likewise, in another study that was conducted by the same lab, researchers found that when participants clenched their teeth and performed leg extensions, they were 10 percent stronger than when they performed the exercise with a relaxed back. jaw. There was another condition in this study too, where the participants clenched their teeth and gripped the machine’s handles with both hands as hard as they could and used the Valsalva maneuver.

And in that case, the participants were about 15 percent stronger on average than when they were doing the leg extensions without using RVC. To summarize, 10 to 20 percent more strength just for clenching your jaw and gripping the bar or the dumbbell or machine as hard as you can and bracing your core.

That’s pretty cool, right? And RVC doesn’t only improve weightlifting performance. Study shows it can improve athletic performance in other ways, such as higher jump performance and grip strength, increased reaction time, improved swing velocity. So in one study, soft ball players were able to swing a bat about three miles per hour faster by just clenching their teeth.

So now let’s talk implementation, how to use remote voluntary contraction in your training. So if you want to do it, here are a few tips. So one is to grip the barbell dumbbell or machine handles as hard as you can always because research suggests that the harder you grip. Or bite when performing an exercise, the more benefit you are going to get from the RVC.

That said, if we’re talking about biting and clenching your jaw, we don’t want to grind our teeth into dust in the gym. We do want to maintain good oral health as well. So if you are going to clench your jaw, just keep that in mind. Don’t try to mash your teeth together as hard as you possibly can. Or if you don’t mind looking like a Spurg, get a mouth guard and that gives you something soft to press your teeth against, or if you would prefer not to bite at all.

Maximally opening your jaw or pressing your tongue into the roof of your mouth as hard as you can be quite effective to I personally do a combination of jaw clenching and tongue pressing, and I’m not afraid to press my tongue into the roof of my mouth as hard as I can, but I don’t smash my teeth.

together as hard as I can, and I guess sometimes I’m thinking about it now, I do end up opening my mouth hard, maybe not as hard as I can toward the end of some sets of some exercises. Okay, my next tip is to use the Valsalva maneuver. I’m repeating myself. But that’s not a bad thing and that is going to increase your force production.

It’s going to help you lift more weight and it’s probably going to lower your risk of injury as well, especially on the squat, the deadlift and the overhead press and any variation of those exercises. And again, if you want to learn about that, just head over to legionathletics. com and search for Valsalva, V A L S A L V A.

A and my final tip here is to learn and use effective weightlifting cues because one of the reasons good cues work is they prompt you to contract different muscles that then help you perform the exercise better. So for example. If you are squatting, an effective cue is to think about spreading the floor apart with your feet, and that’s going to help you engage some of the hip muscles that are necessary for effective squatting.

It’s going to help you also keep your knees in line with your toes when you are dead lifting. I like to think about crushing oranges or tennis balls in my. armpits that helps me really make sure that I am engaging my lats and that makes for a stronger and safer deadlift. And when you are bench pressing, a good weightlifting cue is to think about breaking the bar in half, which of course forces you to grip the bar hard and to try to bend it.

You are putting force into the bar and it will help you perform better on the deadlift. Bench press. And if you want to learn more about weightlifting cues, head over to legionathletics. com, search for weightlifting cues, and you will find an article called complete list of weightlifting cues for perfect form and new PRs.

And that article has a lot of very practical, easy to understand cues. Cues that you can use right away to perform better in the gym. I hope you liked this episode. I hope you found it helpful. And if you did, subscribe to the show because it makes sure that you don’t miss new episodes. And it also helps me because it increases the rankings of the show a little bit, which of course then makes it a little bit more easily found by other people.

Who may like it just as much as you. And if you didn’t like something about this episode or about the show in general, or if you have ideas or suggestions or just feedback to share, shoot me an email. Mike at muscle for life. com muscle F O R life. com. And let me know what I could do better or just what your thoughts are about maybe what you’d like to see me do in the future.

I read everything myself. I’m always looking for new ideas and constructive feedback. So thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.