What to Do When You Can’t Feel a Muscle ‘Working’ While Exercising

You’ve probably heard that you should feel a certain muscle working when you do an exercise. Your biceps should burn a little when you do bicep curls, your quads when you do squats, etc. But this is not an absolute rule. Sometimes you can get a completely effective workout without feeling any specific muscles.

So why do so many people tell you to pay attention to feeling the muscle work? Partly because it can be a useful teaching tool to make sure you’re doing the exercise correctly, but that’s only true for a few exercises. And honestly, another big reason is the influence of bodybuilding jargon and techniques on gym culture in general. Bodybuilders who train for the stage operate with a piece-by-piece mindset: make sure you work This muscle and not that A. This isn’t a big deal if you’re trying to refine your physique after years of training, but this approach isn’t necessary to build muscle in the first place. So here’s what you need to know.

You may not always feel a muscle, even if it is working

Here’s the most important thing to know: you don’t need to feel a muscle for this to work. Let’s say you’re doing a barbell squat. A squat works your quadriceps, glutes and many other muscles. You may not feel each of these because when you perform an intense squat, your brain is processing a plot information. It’s feeling the weight of the bar on your back. It’s about remembering the technical signals you’re trying to focus on. It’s paying attention to your balance as you descend to make sure you don’t tip one way or another. It’s counting the number of reps in your head. Maybe sometimes a muscle manages to say “hey, I’m following your quads and I’m a little sore right now.” But your brain doesn’t have time to listen to the nonsense of every muscle, any more than a mother making dinner has time to listen to every whimper of her toddler. Your brain is focused on the task at hand: making sure you complete the repetition.

I like to think that some muscles are “noisier” than others. If I’m doing kettlebell swings, I might be more focused on getting my forearms burning (from holding on to the kettlebell) and I won’t feel my glutes working at all. But after 100 swings, hoo boy, you can be sure my butt will feel like jelly afterwards. It just didn’t give me that burning sensation in the moment.

When it’s important for you to feel the burn, and when it’s not

So what should you do if you don’t feel the muscle working? You’re looking for another way to be Of course the muscle works. In the case of the compound exercises mentioned above, the fact that you completed the exercise is all the information you need. Your pull-ups used your lats. Your kettlebell swings and squats used your glutes. There is simply no way around this problem.

Does it matter if you feel the muscle? Yes, it can help if you do it isolation exercises. In these exercises, such as a biceps curl or leg extension, you try to focus a movement on one muscle or small muscle group. You “isolate” this muscle. Your brain is a little more able to focus on the sensation of that muscle, And Isolations are the type of exercise where it may be possible to do a similar movement without working the target muscle.

For example, let’s say you’re performing side leg raises to work your hip adductors, particularly the gluteus medius. If your hips are tilted or your legs tilted slightly forward, you can feel the muscles at the front of your hips working. But if you do the same exercise with your back to a wall, sliding your heel along the wall while lifting your leg, you’ll feel it much more in the glute you’re trying to isolate.

Generally, for compound exercises (where multiple muscles work at the same time), it doesn’t matter whether you feel the muscle. But if you’re doing an isolation exercise, feeling the muscle is helpful feedback to make sure you’re isolating the right muscle.

Don’t reduce weight just to feel muscle work

There’s a lot of bad advice out there, and I’d like to point out one thing in particular: the advice to reduce the amount of weight you lift in order to feel the muscles better. Sometimes people will say that it is important to establish a “mind-muscle connection.”

But you don’t need to give up weight on the bar to make this connection. If you want to spend more time feeling the muscles, do some isolation work during your warm-ups. (These are sometimes called “activation” exercises.) You can also do some additional isolation work at the end of your workout, just to give those specific muscles a little more volume.

It’s important to remember that different parts of your workout have different goals. If you are squatting heavy, you need to put some weight on the bar to continue to build your strength and skills while squatting. Often, the lifts that make a muscle feel the hardest are the ones where that muscle works the most! So don’t give up on heavy, efficient lifts just because you don’t “feel” them as well as isolations or warm-ups.