IF YOU WANT TO BE STRONG, THE NERVOUS SYSTEM IS THE BOSS

How to maximize neurological improvements

We’ve all seen a less muscular and much smaller lifter out-lift bigger dudes by a mile; heck maybe you even been the victim of such humiliation. 

I’m sure that most of you have also seen a very muscular person lifting small weights despite their mountain of muscle.

In both cases the main explanation is probably the same: it’s the nervous system!

Science says that a muscle strength is related to it’s cross-section. Or, in lifters’ terms, bigger muscles lift heavier.

That’s been in exercise physiology textbook for at least 50 years.

The problem is that it’s not true, well not exactly.

A more correct sentence would be: “a muscle strength potential is related to it’s cross-section/size”.

What determines how much of that potential you can use while lifting weights depends on how effective your nervous system is at utilizing your muscles. 

A smaller person can lift more weight than a bigger one due to a very efficient nervous system and a weaker big person has a less powerful one.

In this article I’ll cover the following:

1. How the nervous system functions when it comes to force production
2. Why you should focus on improving the nervous system
3. How to improve the various components of the nervous system

THE THREE MAIN COMPONENTS OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM

When we talk about the nervous system in weight lifting context we often use the term CNS (central nervous system). Understand that it is only one of the components of the neuromuscular system.

The three main components, which can all be modified/improve through training, are:

The central nervous system (CNS): The central nervous system is the control center of the body’s communication network. It consists of the brain which processes sensory information, coordinates movement, stores memories, and controls emotions, thought, and decision-making. And the spinal cord which transmits signals between the brain and the rest of the body. The CNS interprets incoming signals, makes decisions, and sends out instructions to the body. When it comes to lifting, it’s the motor cortex that creates the command to contract the muscles (and how hard they to contract) then send it out to the muscles.

The peripheral nervous system (PNS): The peripheral nervous system connects the CNS to the limbs and organs. It includes all the nerves outside the brain and spinal cord and is divided into two main parts:

• Somatic nervous system – Controls voluntary movements of skeletal muscles and transmits sensory information to the CNS.
• Autonomic nervous system – Controls involuntary functions like heartbeat, digestion, and breathing. This is further divided into:
  • Sympathetic (“fight or flight” response)
  • Parasympathetic (“rest and digest” response)

The PNS acts as the messenger system, carrying information back and forth between the CNS and the body. 

The muscles protective mechanisms: These are reflex systems designed to protect muscles and tendons from damage. Two key mechanisms are:

Muscle Spindle Reflex (Stretch Reflex)

Located in muscles, muscle spindles detect changes in muscle length.

When a muscle is stretched too quickly, the reflex triggers contraction to prevent overstretching and injury.

Example: The knee-jerk reflex during a physical exam.

Golgi Tendon Organ Reflex (Inverse Stretch Reflex)

Located in tendons, Golgi tendon organs detect excessive tension.

When tension is too high, they trigger muscle relaxation to prevent tearing.

This helps maintain safe force levels during contractions.

Together, these systems act like built-in “safety brakes” for your muscles. The thing, as we will see later in this article, is that those protective mechanisms are overly conservative, which greatly limits how much of our force potential we can use and what range of motion we can reach.

CENTRAL FATIGUE

A popular concept in resistance training is that of “central fatigue”. This refers to a protective action by the central nervous system to reduce potential for harm in response to a perception of potential danger.

More precisely, it’s a decrease in your CNS’ capacity to send a strong signal to the muscles, leading to a decrease in the recruitment of the power (and growth prone) fast-twitch fibers.

Your peripheral nervous system sends information to the CNS. In the case of physical training it can send signals of discomfort, perceived effort, pain, etc. Those signals tell the CNS that the action being done is a very large stress on the organism and in response, the CNS reduces it’s signal to the muscle, reducing work and force production potential.

When it comes to us, lifters, central fatigue (weaker signal) makes it much harder to recruit the fast-twitch fibers, which require a strong activation signal (high-threshold motor units) to be brought into play. If you don’t bring in the fast-twitch fibers, both force production and muscle growth potential (not to mention speed, power and agility) are significantly reduced.

HOW MANY CARS CAN YOU BUILD?

When explaining how the nervous system impact force production I like to use a car factory analogy (the number of cars you build represents the amount of force you produce).

A bigger factory (bigger muscles) has the potential to produce more cars. But it’s not sufficient.

If you have a big factory but few employees show up for work, you cannot live up to your production potential. The number of workers that show up represents how many muscle fibers you recruit.

You can have a lot of workers showing up, but if they don’t work hard, are lazy, you once again will not live up to your true production potential. How hard the employees work represent what’s called firing rate (how fast the recruited fibers can fire). The higher the firing rate, the more force a finer can produce.

Now, if a lot of employees show up, and they work hard. You will produce up to your potential, right? Not necessarily; If the workers at a work station don’t work well together, it does reduce how much they can produce. This represents intra-muscular coordination (how well the recruited fibers in a muscle work together).

Also, if the various work stations aren’t well coordinated, it can create a bottle neck effect (e.g. if one station is producing much less than the others, holding them back) and you once again come up short of your production potential. This represents inter-muscular coordination (how well all the muscles involved in a movement work together). 

If a lot of employees do show up, they work hard, each station is well-coordinated and so is the whole assembly line there are still a factors that can limit production. You can have workers that are scared of getting hurt so they work at a slower pace to be sure not to get into trouble, maybe too slow. This represents the muscle’s protective mechanisms.

And finally, there might be communication problems between the boss and the workers, if the workers don’t receive their instructions, they can’t produce. That represents the role of the synapses (receiving the command from the CNS and transmitting it to the muscles).

As you can see, a lot can go wrong! 

But it also means that there is a lot of room for improvement.

Let’s examine why you’d want to maximize nervous system efficacy and then the tactics you can use to improve it. 

TACTICS TO IMPROVE YOUR NERVOUS SYSTEM

As we just saw the components that we can act on are: motor-units recruitment, motor-units firing rate, synaptic sensitivity, inter and intra-muscular coordination and protective mechanisms. Let’s look at how to improve each one.

Motor-units recruitment: There are three main ways of recruiting the high-threshold motor-units (fast-twitch fibers); lifting fairly heavy (starting at 80%), lifting explosively (jumps, throws, explosive lifting) and doing hypertrophy work close to failure (the FT fibers will be brought into play on the last 4-5 reps of a set taken close to failure). In most cases, I prefer the first two approaches when I’m specifically trying to boost motor-units recruitment because in the context of strength development, proximity to failure on lighter weights can actually be detrimental by causing too much central fatigue. 

Another great tool to increase motor-units recruitment is overcoming isometrics; pushing or pulling against an immovable resistance for a maximum effort for around 6 seconds. With this method you can recruit up to 10% more motor-units than during a heavy, normal, set.

Motor-units firing rate: The two main ways of improving firing rate are the previous two methods (lifting heavy or lifting explosively) taken to the extreme. When it comes to heavy lifting, at around 80-82% of your maximum you are recruiting the high-threshold motor-units from the start. Past that point, an increase in force production doesn’t come from recruiting more motor-units but by having the recruited one fire/twitch faster (firing rate could be described as how many “twitches” a fiver can do per second). 

Anything above 82% will improve firing rate and the heavier you go, the higher the firing rate. I personally recommend a small amount of work (something like 2-3 sets of 1-2 reps) with 90-92% on a lift. One of my favorite application is to do the heavy sets prior to your normal sets. For example:

2 x 1 @ 90% followed by 3 x 3-5 @ 80%

Another approach is to do a heavy (but not maximal) single prior to every work set. For example:

1 x 1 @ 90%/2-3 min of rest/1 x 6 @ 75%/3 min of rest/1 x 1 @ 90%/2-3 min of rest/1 x 6 @ 77.5%/3 min of rest/1 x 1 @ 90%/2-3 min of rest/1 x 6 @ 80%

I do not recommend maximal or near-maximal effort as the fatigue it causes can nullify the gains in firing rate. You want the weight to be heavy enough to require a high firing rate but the effort level not so much that you are grinding your reps.

Another effective approach is to lift heavy weights fast. The best tool for that being the variations of the olympic lifts. The power snatch from the hang, power clean from the hang, power snatch from blocks, power clean from blocks, explosive high-pulls from the hang, explosive high pull from blocks and power jerk are all goo examples. Those who are not competent on the olympic lifts can use the dynamic effort method, popularized by Westside Barbell. Doing the squat, bench and deadlift as violently explosive as possible with 60-70% of your max. Note that, prior to Westside, Fred Hatfield (who squatted 1015lbs at 45 years of age) recommended compensatory acceleration training (CAT); lifting moderate weights as fast as possible. He recommended 5 x 2 at 80%.

Finally, you can also use high-intensity plyometrics/jumps like depth jumps, altitude drops, hurdle jumps, loaded jump squats (20-30% of your max squat) and medicine ball throws.

Synaptic sensitivity: The more often you contract a muscle, the more sensitive the synapses/neuromuscular junctions become. For example, hockey players have legs that are super responsive to strength training because of the years of skating and using their leg muscles. A study was conducted with olympic lifters in the old USSR and they found that high level lifters (who had a lot more experience on their lifts) required a much smaller neural drive than less qualified lifters to lift the same percentage of their maximum. 

Simply put, by practicing their lifts more often, they become more sensitive to the neural drive. This is cool because it means that you need less effort by the CNS to get the job done, so you become more resilient to central fatigue.

It also mean that your ceiling for force production increases.

The best way to improve synaptic sensitivity (and even add synapses) is a high frequency of training a muscle or a lift. I strongly believe on hitting a lift or muscle at least 3 times a week. This is how olympic lifters train (doing a snatch, clean & jerk and squat variation 4-6 days a week) and how Russian/Eastern block powerlifter tend to train (e.g. Boris Sheiko has his lifter bench, squat and deadlift 4-5 days a week). Obviously this can’t be done if you push your sets to the limit; you need to keep a few reps in the tank to be able to handle that frequency. We are talking about sets of 3-5 reps with 75-80%.

Intra and inter-muscular coordination: Making muscles fibers within a muscle and muscles within a movement work in coordinated fashion is a motor skill. It’s no different than a golf swing, throwing a ball or doing a gymnastics routine. And you improve it the same way:  frequency of practice. The number 1 rule of motor skill development is that the more often you practice a movement, the more efficient you become.

For example, a Crossfit competitor (Crossfit Games level) demanded my help to improve his strict handstand push-ups. In a very short period of time he went from 11 strict handstands, to 22 strict handstand from a deficit (longer range of motion). How did he do it, by practicing his handstand several times per day. When he had some free time he’d so a set of sub maximal handstand push-ups and the goal was cumulating as many total reps as possible during the day, without ever reaching a fatiguing level.

I’ve also used this approach with figure and bikini competitors: they would do vacuums throughout the day: stuck at a red light? Do vacuums. Commercial break on TV? Do vacuums. Taking a walk? Do vacuums.

When I was a kid I would do the wall squat/chair, push-ups and crunches while watching TV (during every commercial break), to this day my abs, triceps and quads are my better muscles.

Years ago, before he trained George St-Pïerre, I trained Firaz Zahabi who was still competing in kickboxing and Greco-Roman Wrestling. He was spending the day at the gym as he was already training fighters at that point. I had him keep a barbell loaded with 185 and he would do power cleans with it throughout the day.

You don’t have to go to this extreme, but understand that the more often you practice a lift, the more efficient you become. By efficient I mean improving intra and inter-muscular coordination as well as technical mastery.

The same thing applies for a lagging muscle. A weaker muscle is often due to less synaptic sensitivity. By training it more often, you can fix that issue.

CAN SUPPLEMENTATION HELP?

Several supplements in the nootropic class can help either improve the CNS’ capacity to send a strong signal or making the synapses more sensitive.

When talking about increasing the neural drive, tyrosine and alpha-GPC are your best bet.

For increasing the sensitivity of the synapses/neuromuscular junctions the best approach is to increase acetylcholine which act on the synapses (among other things). To boost acetylcholine you can use citicoline, Alpha-GPC and Huperzine A.

Don’t get me wrong, supplements will never replace proper training. But it can make a difference that can become significant if you are a competitive athlete looking for that small edge. 

CONCLUSION

So, the next time you see a wiry lifter out-muscling someone twice their size—or a jacked behemoth struggling under a bar—you’ll know the secret isn’t just in the meat, it’s in the wiring. Your nervous system is the real gatekeeper of strength, deciding how much of your muscle’s potential you actually get to use. Unlock it, and you won’t just lift more—you’ll lift beyond what your size alone would ever predict.