Ego Lifting Is
Ego lifting is the act of lifting a heavier load than you can actually handle for some reason other than to absolutely crush your ego, or to prove a point to yourself, usually to prove how strong you really are. It’s probably just a way to avoid the feeling of weakness and internal anxiety that comes from knowing that you’re physically weak, and it’s probably an unhealthy practice. It can be hard to tell whether you’re doing it consciously or subconsciously, but if you’re doing it subconsciously then it’s probably doing more harm than good.
In other words, ego lifting is the act of lifting more weight than your body can actually handle in order to make yourself feel better about your lack of physical strength.
Pro Tips To Avoid Ego Lifting: Especially for Beginners
If you are new to the gym and want to avoid ego lifting, there are a number of things you can do to keep from lifting heavy. I’m going to be listing the things you should do in reverse order of importance.
The most important part of training is mastering the fundamentals
Just the basics down so you can maximize your efficiency, which will result in optimal results. In order to master the fundamentals, you must first have a basic understanding of the subject. You can’t develop your fundamentals if you don’t know what they are. In this article, I’ll discuss the subject of heavy lifting, and how to start lifting heavy effectively. To start off, let’s go over some of the basics.
Lift weights you can handle till failure.
If you want to gain strength and improve your fitness, you need to use heavy weights until the point of failure. To avoid injuries and to continue making progress, you should lower the weights in increments until you are unable to complete another rep.
And always remember if you want to be a better athlete, you do not necessarily need to, just lift heavy. That’s not new advice, but it’s true.
You can get a toned, athletic body without lifting weights that you can barely handle. But have you ever heard of someone lifting for so long and so heavy that they literally fall over? That’s what happens when you let your ego (and ego is a very strong word) get in the way, and let your exercise become an ego battle.
Focus on the best way to get a good rep for each and every lift.
Ego lifters focus on getting a good lift in their mind instead of in reality, which is often a mistake. It’s easy to get caught up in the moment, to feel like “I’m getting strong”, and forget about the other variables that will ultimately give you the best possible lift, such as technique, range of motion, and exercise selection.
Universal Strength vs Ego Lifting
Despite their different approach a Universal Strength approach and an Ego Lifter approach are largely the same. They both lift weights. But differ in respect to a person’s desires, attitude toward training, and motivation for lifting weights.
Strength is something that almost everyone is interested in, but few people know how to define. There are many aspects of strength, and defining it properly is the key to developing it.
To start with strength training requires focus.
For example, trying to lift up something that is very heavy, we wouldn’t just grab it and lift. We first have to control the weight by gripping hard on both sides of the weight and giving it a go. This is an example of controlling heavy weight, it forces us to focus on our muscle coordination as well as our physical capabilities. Those who do exercises in this manner can be said to be developing their physical strengths.
However, there are some psychological theories of strength training have long implied that strength training is primarily a muscle-building activity in which strength is developed in isolated muscles and very little else.
Don’t worry about being the strongest. Worry about being stronger.
This is Cailer Woodlam, a 16-year-old who dreamt of breaking world records and that barbell weighs 445 pounds.
Yeah, it’s most it’s extremely confusing as to why this is impossible. The average novice of his weight and age and only deadlift around 180 pounds not even half of this.
If you’ve been in a gym long enough, you can probably relate to this in one way or another. You might be asking yourself. Why am I so strong? Yet, people who look less muscular than me and who are also a lot weaker than me, lift more.
How come I’m much more muscular. But, I cannot lift the same.
You probably end up frustrated blaming your bad genetics.
But here’s the thing that was far from his most impressive lift as years later, he went on to fulfill his dream, lifting 950 pounds, almost four and a half times his body weight.
It just doesn’t seem like this should be possible.
For example, take four times World’s Strongest Man Brian Shaw, often weights in over 400 pounds is estimated that his max deadlift under the same powerlifting rules falls below this at around 880 pounds.
Even one of the strongest people to ever walk the planet would struggle to execute this same lift and yet Cailer is not the only one displaying seemingly supernatural strength.
Take for example we also have the benchpress here as matters fitness maxing out 397 pounds seems about right for his build will a considerably smaller YouTuber, US powerlifter was able to benchpress 410 pounds over two and a half times his body weight.
So what’s going on, and is a bigger muscle a stronger one.
The fact is you and one of your friends can follow the same program and you’ll both get different results.
Some people just have better genetics for gaining strength others for looking muscular.
And on top of this social media is frequently used by people to manipulate how good they look then of course you are fake weights.
So it can often be confusing, but let’s take off the tinfoil hats and ignored step development.
Muscle Fiber Reletive Strength
To focus a bit more on the science you’re starting with muscle fibers are the absolute strength of a muscle fiber increases the size of a fiber the fibers relative strength tends to decrease.
A study found that the relative strength of bodybuilders muscle fibers was 62% or less than that of power athletes.
This may well be a power athlete’s muscle fibers have a greater relative strength from the heavy explosive training.
The trouble is there’s no direct evidence to support this.
Greg’s knuckles pointed out they could just be having muscle fibers with a higher specific tension predisposes you for success in power sports where explosive relative strength is important.
Whereas having muscle fibers with a weaker relative strength allows bodybuilders to tolerate higher training volumes with a lower risk of injury as each contraction is less forceful.
Either way, variation in muscle fibers relative strength could be the first piece of the puzzle to explain why Cailer lifts more muscular-looking people now if we zoom out from the individual muscle fibers.
Normalized Muscle Force
The next thing to look at is the muscle’s intrinsic ability to produce force muscle size and muscle architecture explain around 50 to 70%.
The variation in how hard a muscle can contract the rest depend on factors that affect muscle strength, independent of muscle size, and this can be explained by the concept known as normalized muscle force where specific tension can be thought of as a muscle fiber relative strength normalized muscle force can be thought of like the whole muscles relative strength and similarly to individual muscle fibers.
The amount of force a muscle can produce varies from person to person, even if the muscle is the same size or strength isn’t all about the actual contraction of the muscle.
Let’s say you’re doing a bicep curl when muscles contract they put against bones creating a rotational force or force similar to the way a spanner works.
If you have a longer handle you can create a greater force in this situation the handle is known as the moment arm and the longer it is given all things equal, the stronger you’ll be if you compared to people whose quotes were the same strength but one of them had a fortunate moment arm and the other had an unfortunate one the person with the longer muscle moment arm would be able to produce a 19% larger knee extensor moment.
This variation in muscle moment arms has been shown to account for around 20% of the variability in men’s knee extension strength.
We can expect that those who are elite at a particular exercise have favorable muscle moment arms for that particular movement.
Muscle bellies and insertion points can also have an impact on parents, for example, the calf muscles are shown here.
On the left, we have a longer muscle belly and shorter tendon which looks arguably more impressive on the shorter muscle belly, and a longer tendon on the right never example is in the biceps.
On the left is IFBB pro, Greg D sharp us favorable long muscle bellies, then on the right Louie Marco. with shorter muscle bellies.
Of course, there’s a size difference, but this highlights how muscle belly variation can help you out the locking arms and make you look bigger as a result.
One of the most significant genetic influences on your strength for the left is, of course, your anthropometry.
Physical proportions can vary greatly from person to person. For the deadlift, in particular, it’s often favorable to have long arms and a short torso.
As you can see, the person on the left has a shorter range of motion, his hips are also closer to the bar, reducing the moment he has to fight against his back is more upright.
And to top it all off, his joint angles are more open, which is also an advantage, you can almost certainly lift more weight from this position, as opposed to this position.
Assuming all things equal, but proportions the guy on the left will destroy the person on the right. A good real-world example is that of Lamar gone, racing quite clearly to see his advantages longer arms, aiding his impressive deadlift.
When you combine all of these factors, the variation between how strong someone is and how muscular they are begins to make a lot more sense.
While you may be annoyed at your short arms for the deadlift, there is some good news, you may be better suited to bench pressing a longer Achilles tendon, and you may be an advantage for long-distance running.
So it’s not just a case of good or bad. And while most of these things are unchangeable, there are also things that you can change and develop. In my last video on Jim shark, a few people in the comment section were essentially using unrealistic body standards and their bad genetics as an excuse to not train at all, which is completely ridiculous.
The fact is, many of these physical traits are normally distributed, so they’re probably not as bad as you’re making them out to be.
Secondly, a healthy adult with sub-optimal genetics, who follows a good well-structured program could achieve a strength standard or physique naturally, which some people claim took steroids to build.
To start with this cop-out stuff. Stop blaming your genetics, the first influencing factor is of course technique and practice. The factors without an insane amount of practice and technique adjustment to best optimize deadlift form, Cailer would never have increased his deadlift from 445 950 pounds.
In addition to technical proficiency, neural efficiency plays a very key role, it’s possible to develop a better mind-muscle connection from training motor neuron pathways. With more practice of a particular exercise, your neural efficiency will likely improve and therefore the amount of weight you can lift.
There are also performance-enhancing drugs or PEDs
This allows people to gain a lot more strength than muscle, a large amount of World Class strength athletes do take, as Clarence Kennedy said best, a lot of people don’t realize that professional athletes use drugs.
And people that know also assume everyone knows.
But I’d say only a small percentage of the population knows what’s going on.
The fact is performance-enhancing drugs will likely always be a part of competitive sports.
And while I don’t advocate for them myself, it’s completely understandable why people use them, they can be simply effective.
Expect to put on 50 pounds on your bench press in three months for men, women are not going to gain that kind of strength. But for men, 50 pounds for women, probably half of that.
I think it’s also important to consider the effect that body fat has on perceived strength. Many would assume that the Christine who’s been on the left is stronger than the one on the right when in reality, it’s the other way around.
Well, this covers most of the main factors, which influence how strong someone appears to be versus how strong they are, it would be a long and for most people unnecessary process to explore them all.
So what does this mean for you? The fact is, many of these physical traits are normally distributed. So it’s unlikely you have truly bad genetics more likely you fall in the average range.
When many people see a powerlifter lifting a disproportionate amount of weight.
They assume that strength training is pointed us off though they don’t just want to be strong.
They want to look stronger as well, but the fact remains a bigger muscle is a stronger muscle relative to the person You only have to compare 16-year-old Cailer to the 20-year-old Cailer to see this regardless of wherever you want to get stronger or gain more muscle strength progression should be your goal.
Genetics do limit how big or strong you can get. But most of the people complaining about it are nowhere near their strength potential. And most people have completely average genetics, which can take them very far.
There are probably people with better deadlifting genetics and Kayleigh, one of you may be watching this video.
The difference is he capitalized on his favorite genetics by optimizing all of the variables which he can control. If you want to explore the contributors to strike.
But the most important takeaway from this my reason for making it is that in a world full of almost 8 billion people, there are just too many variables for comparison to be a good thing.
Most of the time, instead of focusing on your genetic flaws, more other people are doing progressive overload should be your goal. train harder than last time or as Cailer said himself.
