How to Prime Your Muscles for Optimal Performance: Part 1

Why Prime Your Muscles for Optimal Performance?

The idea of ‘priming’ muscles is important both to injury prevention and to performance enhancement. One way in which it occurs is due to the following: Most, if not all of us, have certain muscles that are facilitated or ‘overactive’ and muscles that are inhibited ie. Muscles that do all of the work even when they’re not supposed to, and those that don’t do what they’re supposed to even when we want them to. They are often agonist-antagonist pairs on opposite sides of a joint, with the facilitated muscle being what we often refer to as ‘short and tight’ and the inhibited muscles ‘long and weak’ (keep in mind though that a facilitated muscle may also be weak and taut). A common example is the quadriceps- hamstring coupling and their effects on the knee; if the quadriceps group is overactive compared to the hamstrings, then, when say, the athlete is landing a box jump, contraction of the quadriceps - attached to tibial tuberosity (lower leg bone) through the patellar tendon - without adequate co-contraction of the hamstrings on the opposite side of the leg will result in anterior translation of the tibia and grinding or shearing on the patella (knee cap), as well as wear and tear of the tendon itself. Long term, this imbalance in opposing muscle groups multiplied over numerous workouts, runs and basically any lower limb exercise requiring stability around the knee, can lead to degeneration of the patella joint, conditions such as patella femoral pain syndrome as well as ligament and meniscal injuries and osteoarthritis.

 In regards to why we prime muscles for optimal performance, where you have overactive muscles you usually also have opposing or surrounding inhibited and weak muscles that aren’t able to do what they’re supposed to do. In our bodies these tend to be our large prime movers and our smaller stabilizing muscles respectively. Although increased risk of injury in this imbalanced situation is the more serious consequence, you will also see a breakdown, plateau or lack of progression in performance. A body is only as strong as its weakest link, and as you lift heavier, run faster or train more frequently, this imbalance in muscle activation and firing leads to incorrect posture, faulty biomechanics and overuse of muscles. The stronger muscles continue getting stronger and the weaker ones stay weak, reinforcing bad motor patterns and in turn resulting in poor performance and injury – unless we learn how to correct this imbalance, which we can do by ‘priming’ muscles as well as its equally important partner, ‘toning down or inhibiting others.

So How Does Priming Muscles Pre-Workout Prevent Injuries?

Priming your muscles before a workout, playing sport or doing any type of physical activity means that you are more likely to move in an optimal way which reduces your risk of injury and improves performance; this is turn enables you to build intensity, maintain workload and progress load, duration and frequency of exercise all of which contribute to better health and achieving overall fitness and aesthetic goals. If you’re not training right from a postural and physiological point of view, you WILL hurt yourself eventually and/or find you’re not able to get progress further. I see these clients in my clinic all the time, and its not until we go back to basics - and yes, sometimes that means having to do ‘rehab’ type exercises and stretch for 30 minutes before every workout until they achieve a better neuromuscular balance within their bodies – that they’re able to recover from their recurrent injuries and achieve the heights that they want to reach.

So how do we ‘prime’ our muscles for better performance and less injury then? I’ll go into that in next week’s post!