Devlin Brown at the water cooler: Treat your body like a GNU — don’t let one part dominate

Is it normal to focus on a muscle to develop it and bring it up to par, only to notice it is also becoming stiff after training another muscle group? This has never happened before, please help.

In the absence of any real context in your question, which is a bit like leaked letters sending everyone — media included — into hyperspeculation mode, we will answer this question with a hypothetical scenario.

Bringing up a weak or lagging muscle is different to deciding, for whatever reason, to overdevelop a muscle that was not weak or lagging in the first place. In the first scenario, you are training to achieve balance and synchronicity in your movement patterns. In the latter, you risk muscle imbalances and other complications.

You may be wondering why on earth anyone would want to overdevelop a single muscle. Think about international chest day. If you haven’t heard about it, that’s when every gym bro in the world flocks to the bench press on Mondays because, you know, bench pressing is a sign of how strong you are and walking around with a puffed-up chest demonstrates your dominance.

However, many young chest-day warriors often have poor posture, with shoulders rounded forward as a result of their pectoral muscles overpowering other muscles in the upper body. They often develop painful shoulder impingements as a result and then treat the “sports injury” as a badge of honour. If they were to see a specialist, besides stretching and foam rolling, they would likely be put on a programme to strengthen muscles they can’t see in the mirror to fix their imbalance.

However, you wrote that you trained a muscle “to bring it up to par”, so we know this isn’t you. A few months ago we spoke about the benefits of strong glutes, so let’s assume someone realises, or has been told, they have weak or lazy glutes, which is affecting their lower body strength and movement dynamics. Remember, our butt is a muscle, not a cushion, and sitting on it all day makes it lazy.

What would a weak or lazy gluteus maximus do to a squat? The quads, lower back and anterior hip muscles may well jump in and over-compensate. Besides being inefficient, this is the territory of injuries. This makes one of the best exercises in the gym dangerous at worst, and likely to cause pain (such as in the lower back) at best.

This person may well be advised to start taking a wider stance during squats or dead lifts (if their mobility allows), and to do variations of split squats and step-ups that target increased glute activation. They are also likely to do direct glute work such as hip thrusts and glute bridges. Perhaps they’d even do glute squeezes after every session.

By focusing on this training, they develop a mind-muscle connection, meaning they are able to more effectively recruit that muscle during exercise. A good way to describe it is that the muscle becomes “activated”. Now, when they do normal squats, they feel their glutes being recruited — unlike before, when their quads and back were doing all the work. Remember, you don’t always get stiff, but if you do, feeling the right muscles get stiff is a sign things are working as they should.

However, too much of a good thing becomes a problem. There’s no shortage of studies that show overactivation of muscles can lead to them becoming dominant, which alters movement patterns and negatively affects performance and increases the risk of injury.

This is applicable across all your movement patterns, not just the squat. A healthy body should be able to squat, lunge, push and pull horizontally and vertically, rotate and hinge. And, of course, you need a healthy gait pattern for your walking and running.

The problem with “bodypart” thinking during strength training is that if it is not programmed properly, it doesn’t appreciate the need for a functional body. It’s a bit like a government of national unity (GNU) — when one party becomes too dominant there’s a real risk of dysfunction.

Enjoy your newly activated muscle. Just be cognisant of where it fits in the bigger picture. You want balance, not dominance.