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Wellness Wednesday for August 23, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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smaller stabilizing muscles

I think I would argue that it’s not that you can’t target the “smaller” muscles in the body with a machine, it’s that a machine that travels in a fixed path requires less firing of multiple muscle groups synergistically.

For example, for a high bar back squat, the prime movers are the quadriceps, but the synergists include the gluteus maximus, which is a “big” muscle group. The hamstrings are considered a dynamic stabilizer in the movement but should not be “small” and should be trained to fire in coordination with the quadriceps. A leg extension removes much of the requirement for the coordinated contraction between the quadriceps and hamstrings.