Why Muscles Don’t Matter

At first glance it may seem like a silly title of a blog post related to helping people achieve their fitness goals from becoming leaner, gaining more muscle, getting stronger, and the like. How could you achieve such goals WITHOUT focusing on muscles? 

Well, I’m being a bit tricky here, of course you want to train muscles, however, most people get fixated on training a few “key” muscles that cause us to loose direction with our training. It doses’t matter if you are speaking about training glutes, rotator cuffs, quads, pecs, serratus anterior there is a common misconception that runs through all of them. 

That is ONE muscle is important than any other muscle in the body! In fact, NO muscle works all by itself and trying to focus on one muscle whether to build greater strength, muscle mass, or rehab is pointless. Yes, pointless. 

“Josh, doesn’t research show that if you perform this or that exercise that you activate MORE of that muscle?” 

Yes, but that is only part of the story. Let’s explore what the research really tells us with some of these examples. 

This 2023 study, “Hip thrust and back squat training elicit similar gluteus muscle hypertrophy and transfer similarly to the deadlift” compared glute growth and strength gains of a squat compared to a hip thrust. What did they find?

Even though the hip thrust had greater glute activation and subject felt the glutes burn more, this actually did NOT lead to greater growth of the glutes in the hip thrust compared to the squat. In fact, the squat had more overall muscle growth than the hip thrust. This is our first example of how even if you feel a muscle burn and you see more EMG activity it may not translate to real world results like you think because the body is NOT designed to work in parts. 

In another 2015 study, “Effect of Lower Extremity and Trunk Muscles Recruitment on Serratus Anterior Activation” explains, “The shoulder is a part of the kinetic chain and the body is considered as a linked system of articulated segments. Each segment (lower extremity, trunk, pelvis and upper extremity) in the kinetic chain has a specific role in ensuring that the upper extremity performs efficiently in athletic endeavors. This coordinated sequencing of the segments is known as the kinetic chain. Sequential activation of the lower extremity, pelvis and trunk muscles is required to facilitate the transfer of appropriate forces from these body segments to the upper extremity. Such forces result in a harmonized movement at the upper extremity needed in throwing activities in various sports. Momentum generated by the larger segments in the kinetic chain is transferred to the adjacent distal segments. This mechanism results in summation of individual speeds and forces at each segment. Putnam demonstrated that the forces acting at a joint are influenced by the motions at the adjacent segments in the chain. The ultimate speed and forces achieved by the distal segment are the product of all the individual segments in the kinetic link. Thus the timely flow of the energy from the lower to the

upper part of the body is vital for effective sporting motions to occur at the shoulder joint”

Yea, that is a long way of saying that one happens in one area of the body happens more than in just one area. That what occurs at one joint or muscle has an chain reaction through a series of muscles, joints, and tissues. 

I could keep going, but how about ONE last one? 

When isolated training was compared to more integrated strength training in this study, “Comparison of integrated and isolated training on performance measures and neuromuscular control”

Researchers found that the improvements in the isolated group were much less than the integrated group. The integrated training group improved in agility, strength, and endurance more than the isolated group.

 

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That is why in DVRT we don’t focus on one individual muscle, but patterns of movement. When we focus on patterns as you see in the videos below we train muscles, but in the way they were meant to perform and this leads to far greater results in strength, stability, mobility, and even helping people losing body fat. 

I didn’t say this was the easier way to train, it is MUCH easier to go and try to isolate this and that muscle or joint, but it DOES give you such a stronger benefit to so many different fitness goals to train like you see we do in DVRT below!

Don’t miss the last week to get our early bird price on our end of June online CEU Exercise Prescription Masterclass. Raise the bar on your coaching and improve your confidence in picking the RIGHT exercises. Jump over HERE to learn more and to register. 

 

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