What does muscle compensation mean?

Muscles are relatively important tissues in the body. They have extremely strong elasticity and can continuously provide power output to the body, ensuring that the body's movements can continue. Muscle health is the most important thing. People use exercise to maintain and enhance muscle health. However, some abnormal situations may occur during the exercise. For example, muscle compensation is a common problem. Let’s take a look at what muscle compensation means.

Muscle compensation: "When the body wants/needs to achieve a certain goal (purpose) but finds that the originally set movement pattern cannot successfully achieve the goal, the alternative movement is extended."

Muscle compensation can only be alleviated to a small extent, but it cannot be avoided. At the same time, it is not recommended to pursue complete muscle isolation.

People who regularly do fitness training will find that muscle compensation mainly occurs in the following types of training.

1. Explosive training is prone to muscle compensation

The involvement of inertia will increase the load on muscles and joints. In order to protect the body from injury, the muscles will work together during explosive training.

The way to reduce muscle compensation through explosive training is to tense the body and use the whole body stiffness to replace the muscle compensation problem of coping with inertia.

For example, when doing explosive training such as push-ups and squat jumps, you can tense your whole body, which can reduce compensation.

2. Heavy weight training is prone to muscle compensation

Muscle compensation during heavy weight training is caused by insufficient strength of a single muscle or lack of familiarity with the movement.

The first thing you should think of is to lower the weight and try again. You can also pause for a long time at the top and bottom of the movement to increase your familiarity with the movement.

For example, when doing bench press or deadlift, you can try pausing at the bottom of the movement to increase your familiarity.

3. High-difficulty movements are prone to muscle compensation

The more complex the movement and the more joints involved, the more obvious the muscle compensation will be. This is an instinct.

There are different methods and postures for different movements, such as the hip flexion posture during squats, the elbow clamping posture during push-ups, the arched waist posture during bench presses, and so on.