Strong Mind, Strong Body: How Thinking About Exercise Can Make You Stronger!

Wouldn’t it be great if all we had to do to get stronger was to think about exercise? This might sound like a crazy dream, but research has shown that not only is this possible, but it is highly effective! And you wonder why us Pilates instructors always go on about the “mind to muscle connection”…

A couple of weeks ago, I listened to an episode of Michael Mosley’s Just One Thing on Spotify (if you haven’t listened to this series, I would highly recommend you do!), and I became utterly fixated on one episode in particular: ‘Think Yourself Stronger’. In this, Michael does a deep dive into the world of ‘mind to muscle connections’, and the science behind it, backed with peer-reviewed empirical studies, and I couldn’t listen without sharing what I found out with you guys. Let’s get into it.

It turns out that spending time thinking about exercise can make you a better athlete than just physically performing the sport; since the 1800s, motor imagery training has been used to improve accuracy and power in athletes, from gymnasts, to tennis players, to runners. You might think I’m starting to sound mad, but stick with me. It’s not the actual muscles that are getting stronger here (wouldn’t that be great though?!), but it’s the recruitment of muscle fibres which becomes more effective: through imagining the movement required in a particular exercise, you can train your brain to recruit more muscle fibres in a particular area, so that when you do perform the exercise, you then have more fibres available quicker, and can therefore exert more power, with greater accuracy. This process takes place in the motor-programming stage of movement, preparing our bodies to contract our muscle fibres, and the science is astounding.

In the 1990s, researchers at Louisianna State University decided to put this theory to the test. Participants were asked to imagine extending their leg when sat down, imagining the feeling of contracting the quadriceps (thigh) muscle, but without actually contracting any muscles. At the end of the study, researchers compared the strength of the quadriceps muscle to a baseline level taken before the motor imagery training. Amazingly, the muscle strength of participants had increased by an average of 12.6%, without having actually trained the muscles in exercise at all – they had simply thought about exercise, and subsequently become stronger.

Michael replicated this study, and found similarly astounding results, demonstrating an average increase of 8% in muscle strength. As I mentioned earlier, the muscles themselves aren’t technically increasing in size, or getting ‘stronger’ in the traditional sense, but participants are able to recruit more muscle fibres – in fact, up to 20% more. This intense concentration when thinking about an exercise sends focussed signals from your brain to your muscles to guarantee efficient recruitment of muscle fibres: physical practice increases our muscle mass as we know, but motor imagery training proves that strength can be increased by thought, as our muscles become more efficient.

This phenomenon is most effective when a person uses a first-person perspective, alternating between mental imagery and physical execution of the exercise, and is also more effective when replicating the exercise as closely as possible. You should try to feel your body performing the movement before or during the movement, trying to create as vivid an image as you can of a specific muscle contracting. Ideally, this should be completed in the same environment or location as you will be performing the exercise, so a football player would complete their motor imagery training on the football pitch for example.

Next time you’re in Pilates class, or on your morning cycle, or whichever form of exercise you choose to occupy your time with, I challenge you to engage your mind to muscle connection, imagining yourself completing a movement before you attempt it, and see if you too can think yourself stronger.

Let me know how it goes!

Melie x