What Should You Do If You Don’t Feel Like Your Muscle Is Working During Your Workout?
You’ve probably heard that you should feel a specific muscle working when performing an exercise. For example, your biceps should feel a slight burn during dumbbell curls, your quads during squats, and so on. But this isn’t an ironclad rule. Sometimes you can get a perfectly effective workout without feeling any specific muscle working at all.
So why do so many people recommend paying attention to how your muscles feel? Partly because it can be a useful training tool, helping you ensure you’re performing an exercise correctly—but that’s only true for certain exercises. And frankly, another important reason is the influence of bodybuilding terminology and techniques on gym culture in general. Bodybuilders training for a stage performance operate on a “step-by-step” principle: make sure you’re working this muscle, not that muscle . That’s fine if you’re trying to improve your physique after years of training, but it’s not necessary for building muscle. So here’s what you need to know.
You may not always feel the muscle even if it is working.
Here’s the key: you don’t have to feel a muscle for it to work. Let’s say you’re doing barbell squats. Squats engage your quads, glutes, and a bunch of other muscles. You might not feel each one because when you’re doing heavy squats, your brain is processing a lot of information. It feels the weight of the barbell on your back. It’s remembering the technical details you’re trying to focus on. It’s maintaining balance during the descent so you don’t fall over. It’s counting the reps in its head. Maybe sometimes a muscle will suddenly let you know, “Hey, those are your quads, and I’m a little sore right now.” But your brain doesn’t have time to listen to all that nonsense from each muscle, just like a mom cooking dinner doesn’t have time to listen to her toddler’s every whining. Your brain is focused on the task at hand: making sure you get all your reps done.
I like to think that some muscles “work louder” than others. If I’m doing kettlebell swings, I might be more focused on the burn in my forearms (from holding the kettlebell) and not feel my glutes working at all. But after 100 swings, oh my god, you can bet my butt will feel like jelly. I just didn’t feel that burn at the time .
When it matters whether you feel a burning sensation and when it doesn’t.
What should you do if you don’t feel the muscle working? You need to find another way to confirm that it’s working. In the case of the compound exercises mentioned above, the very fact that you’re performing the exercise is all the information you need. Your pull-ups engaged your lats. Your kettlebell swings and squats engaged your glutes. There’s no getting around it.
Does it matter whether you can feel the muscle? Yes, it can help if you perform isolation exercises. In exercises like bicep curls or leg extensions, you try to focus the movement on one muscle or a small group of muscles. You “isolate” that muscle. Your brain is better able to focus on the sensation of that one muscle, and isolation exercises are the type of exercise where you can perform a similar movement without engaging the target muscle.
For example, let’s say you’re performing side-lying leg lifts to target your hip adductors, particularly the gluteus medius. If your hips are tilted or your feet are slightly forward, you might feel the muscles in the front of your thigh working. But if you perform the same exercise with your back against a wall and sliding your heel up the wall as you lift your leg, you’ll feel a much greater engagement on the gluteus medius you’re trying to isolate.
Typically, when performing multi-joint exercises (where multiple muscles work simultaneously), muscle sensation doesn’t matter. However, when performing an isolation exercise, muscle sensation provides helpful feedback to ensure you’re isolating the correct muscle.
Don’t reduce weight just to feel the muscles working.
There’s a lot of bad advice out there, and I’d like to highlight one in particular: the advice to reduce the weight you lift to feel your muscles better. Sometimes people say it’s important to establish a “mind-muscle connection.”
But you don’t have to give up weight on the bar to establish this connection. If you want to spend more time feeling the muscles, perform a few isolation exercises during your warm-up. ( These are sometimes called “activation” exercises .) You can also perform additional isolation exercises at the end of your workout to slightly increase the stress on those specific muscles.
It’s important to remember that different parts of your workout have different goals. If you’re squatting heavy, you’ll need to add additional weight to the bar to continue building strength and improving your squat skills. Often, the exercises that are the hardest to feel a muscle working are the ones that actually work that muscle the most! So, don’t skip out on heavy, effective exercises just because you don’t “feel” them as well as isolation exercises or warm-ups.