Posing can help you build muscle

Although it may sound incredible, posing can help you build muscle and it does so in several ways without requiring much time or effort.

But, in reality, when we tell you that posing can help you build muscle, we are speaking from a scientific point of view, because the mirror is a tool you can use daily, which increases your concentration.

If you want to know how to do it to achieve a strong body, pay attention to the following information we are sharing with you today.

A little history of posing

Max Sick was a “strongman” from the early 20th century who adopted the stage name Maxick.

He developed a training system (Maxalding) to build muscle and strength through “muscle control” exercises, not strength exercises as we know them. It consisted of holding various positions to focus on contracting specific muscles.

First, he learned to contract all his muscles and then worked on extending the duration or increasing the intensity of the contraction.

His system, consisting mainly of “poses” and bodyweight exercises, really worked for Maxick, who displayed a very muscular physique before steroids were invented, and although he had good genetics, he still achieved great results. Now, can posing help you build muscle?

The benefits of posing for your muscles

We could never say that posing is as effective as weight training, but it is certainly a tool you can use to maximize your gains from lifting weights and maintain your muscle mass when you do not have access to a gym.

Let’s look at the main benefits of posing and how you can use them to achieve various goals.

• Improves the mind-muscle connection.
• Enhances the effect during pre-competition.
• Maximizes muscle tone.
• Helps with fat loss.
• Stimulates muscle hypertrophy.

It is useful to cite the benefits to understand how posing can help you build muscle, but let’s analyze each benefit.

Posing improves the mind-muscle connection

If you cannot contract a muscle, it will be very difficult to stimulate it when you exercise it properly. If you cannot contract a muscle during a low-skill activity, will you be able to contract it correctly when you add the skill requirement of moving a heavy object?

This may seem like a contradiction simply because the load forces the muscle to produce some tension, but a muscle that you can never contract will never be optimally engaged in a movement.

This means that isolation exercises for the muscle will not be effective until you can improve the connection between your mind and muscles.

Evidence from several studies suggests that the better you are at contracting a muscle, the easier it will be to make it grow.

Posing is the simplest way to work on the connection between your mind and muscles; it does not require much energy or time, and no equipment is needed—you can do it anywhere.

You can try doing stomach vacuums and glute squeezes throughout the day, as well as focusing on keeping your abs tight while walking (imagining that they are about to receive a punch in the stomach).

Contracting your muscles daily through a posing flex, will improve the connection between your mind and musclesand make your regular training more effective.

Posing enhances the pre-competition effect

You have probably noticed at some point that after a competition, you looked better the day after stepping onstage… you looked huge and hard…

This could be due to eating after a show, as well as reduced stress, since cortisol causes you to retain water and reduces muscle glycogen.

However, one decisive factor could be the large number of poses and contractions you performed throughout the day, consuming some carbohydrates before doing your poses.

Now, if you are not a competitive bodybuilder, howcan posing help you build muscle?

You can learn from this that contracting and posing can draw nutrients into the muscle you are contracting. If you draw nutrients into the muscle without causing muscle damage (which you will not do with a flex), you can facilitate recovery from a workout you did earlier that day or the previous day.

If you have enough carbohydrates and amino acids in your bloodstream and pose, you can deliver more glucose and amino acids to that muscle, which would accelerate muscle growth and glycogen replenishment in a trained muscle.

In other words, posing accelerates muscle repair and helps you build more muscle in response to your training.

How?… Well, protein synthesis remains elevated for up to 30–36–72 hours in a trained muscle, and that is the time you have to repair the damage and add tissue, since once that period ends, the process ends…

In other words, the faster you can repair the muscle (because nutrients are more readily available), the less time it will take to repair the damage, and the more growth you can achieve before the time limit ends.

Posing improves muscle tone

The main benefit of posing appears to be improved muscle tone, because the better a muscle contracts, the more sensitive the neuromuscular junctions become (when the signal to contract reaches the muscle).

The more sensitive muscle will activate with a much weaker signal. 

Since muscle tone is simply a low-level muscle contraction, if the muscle responds better to contraction, it is much easier to maintain a low-level contraction that will increase muscle tone.

Although this is a short-term solution, daily contraction and posing can help you build quality muscle.

Athletes with the best mind-muscle connection and muscle control, who are the most neurologically efficient, have the best physiques, even at rest—as do gymnasts, for example.

Posing helps you lose fat

Posing regularly can also affect fat loss, and it does so through three mechanisms.

• First, increased calorie expenditure while practicing poses: any activity that requires muscle contraction requires energy, and if you spend 15 minutes of the day posing and flexing your muscles, you will burn some energy doing it.
• The second mechanism is through an improvement in muscle insulin sensitivity and glucose uptake, where contraction affects muscle glycogen as well as GLUT4 translocation and expression. This basically leads to greater glucose transport from the bloodstream without the need for insulin; in other words, muscle contraction brings glucose into that muscle, which affects fat storage.
• The third mechanism is that you can increase muscle tone at rest: muscle tone is a state of partial muscle activation, but even though it is a low-level contraction, it is still a contraction and requires energy to maintain.

In this scenario, posing can help you build muscle while preventing you from accumulating body fat in the process.

Posing to stimulate hypertrophy

Posing will not cause significant muscle damage or activation of the mTOR pathway, but there are other mechanisms that can lead to muscle growth.

The main one is the accumulation of local growth factors: hormones released directly in the contracting muscle that have a strong anabolic effect.

• These hormones are released when a muscle contracts and there is a buildup of lactate, as well as a hypoxic state (lack of oxygen in the working muscle).
• Lactate is a byproduct of using glucose as fuel inside the muscle, which normally begins to accumulate when a muscle contracts at a sufficiently high intensity for about 30 seconds.
• As long as the intensity of the muscle contraction is sufficient, lactate is maximized in sets lasting 40 to 70 seconds.

This concept works for conventional exercises, but lactate builds up faster (30–40 seconds) due to the constant tension when posing can help you build muscle.

Remember that, in a conventional exercise with contractions in phases, there are moments when the muscle contraction decreases, allowing blood to enter and leave the muscle, which removes some lactate, so it takes longer to accumulate.

When you pose and never release the muscle contraction, blood cannot enter or leave, and lactate builds up faster; the more the muscle contracts, the faster lactate accumulates.

That same constant muscle contraction that prevents blood from entering the muscle to remove lactate also prevents the supply of oxygen to the muscle, leading to a local oxygen debt, the second factor involved in the release of growth factors.