Weak or Inefficient?

Daily, people tell me that they have been told they have a weak muscle that needs strengthening.

The most recent being a weak SCM (sternocleidomastoid, or neck muscle to make it easier). The irony of this comment was the following statement; “Yes I’ve been told that it’s weak, and it’s all tight and contracted, you can feel it bulging it’s so tight, and it pulls my head to one side!”. So it’s tight and contracted but weak and needs strengthening, right??

Wrong! It’s tight and contracted and INEFFICIENT/TIRED, not weak.

When a muscle is tight and constantly contracted the last thing you want to do is start doing strengthening exercises and, if it was weak, weak in relation to what? Someone else? The other side? Your perception of how strong it should be? Anyway, I digress. If we start trying to strengthen this muscle we are going to be contracting it, working it harder and contracting it more, the outcome being a muscle that is more contracted, more than it was, possibly in complete spasm, possibly increasing in pain with further restriction in range of movement. “But it feels weak”, I hear you say, “ it must be if I cant move it as well, right? “. Wrong!

If I were to ask you to stand and hold a dumbbell of a couple of kilos, with your elbow flexed you would initially be able to do for a short period, but gradually the arm would tire, it would start to feel uncomfortable, and slowly you would lose the perceived strength to continue holding the dumbbell. The muscle isn’t weak, it got tired, it’s been working too hard for too long, it needs to relax and rest.

When someone has ‘chronically‘ contracted muscles they tire, they may become sore, painful, stiff and have less range of movement. The muscles needs to relax and rest to regain full control of that muscle again.

The problem is that weak is a misleading term, often people will think that because they have been told that something is weak it has wasted away; like a leg that has just come out of a plaster cast. Now that would be weak because it hasn’t done anything for 6 weeks and the muscle volume has reduced.

If a muscle is constantly contracted to, for example, 70% of its full range of contraction, when they need to use that muscle they wouldn’t have the full power of the muscle to do whatever it is they want to do, thus this inefficient muscles appears weak. Added to that the fact that they have not been able to consciously relax this muscle for however long, will potentially leave it feeling, sore, stiff, tired and restricted.

So let’s stop telling people they have tight contracted muscles that need strengthening and start helping them to understand that their muscle is over contracted, over tired and needs to relax and rest, allowing them to take back full control of that muscle once again.