What to Do When You Can't Feel a Muscle Activating

We work out to build and strengthen our muscles, which is why the bodybuilder's approach of targeting individual muscles is so appealing: You focus on the muscle you want to work and ensure you can feel it in action.

But what if you’re doing a glute exercise and don’t feel it in your glutes? Or performing a lat pulldown and only feel it in your biceps? Here's a guide to help you out.

It’s possible to work a muscle without necessarily feeling it in action every time

Here’s the key point to remember: You don’t have to feel a muscle working for it to actually be active. For example, when doing a pullup, your lats are engaged whether or not you can feel them. The lats, which are the upper back muscles responsible for drawing your arms closer to your torso, are crucial for completing a pullup.

Take squats, for instance. A barbell squat engages your quads, glutes, and several other muscles. But when you’re lifting heavy, your brain is processing a lot of information. It’s focused on the weight on your back, recalling the right form, maintaining your balance as you lower yourself, and keeping track of your rep count. While your muscles might send a signal like “hey, I’m your quads and I’m feeling the burn,” your brain has more pressing matters to attend to, just like a busy mom doesn’t have time to entertain every little complaint from her child.

Some muscles are just more “vocal” than others. For example, during kettlebell swings, I might be more aware of my forearms burning from gripping the kettlebell, and not even notice my glutes working. But after 100 swings, my glutes will definitely be sore, even though they didn’t give me that burning feeling in the moment.

When it matters whether you feel the burn, and when it doesn’t

So, what do you do if you can’t feel a muscle working? You find other ways to confirm that the muscle is indeed engaged. With compound exercises like pullups, kettlebell swings, and squats, simply completing the movement confirms that the targeted muscles are being worked. Your pullups activate your lats. Your kettlebell swings and squats engage your glutes. There’s no question about it.

Does it really make a difference whether you feel the muscle? It can be beneficial in isolation exercises. In these movements, like a bicep curl or leg extension, your aim is to focus the effort on a single muscle or a small muscle group.

For instance, consider performing side-lying leg raises to target your hip adductors, especially the glutes. If your legs are slightly angled forward, you might feel the muscles at the front of your hips. However, if you position yourself with your back against a wall and slide your heel along the surface as you raise your leg, you’ll experience the exercise more intensely in the glute you intend to isolate.

Generally speaking, in compound exercises where multiple muscles engage simultaneously, feeling the muscle doesn’t hold much significance. However, in isolation exercises, sensing the muscle provides valuable feedback to ensure you're targeting the correct muscle.

What should be avoided

There’s a great deal of misleading advice circulating, and I want to address one specific point: the suggestion to reduce the weight you're lifting in order to better feel the muscles. Some people emphasize the importance of building a 'mind-muscle connection.'

You don’t have to drop the barbell to establish that mind-muscle connection. If you want to spend more time focusing on the muscle, try adding some isolation exercises during your warmup. (These are often referred to as 'activation' exercises.) You can also include extra isolation work at the end of your workout to add more volume to those specific muscles.

It’s essential to keep in mind that different phases of your workout serve different purposes. If you’re squatting heavy, you need to put some fucking weight on the bar to continue progressing in both strength and technique. Often, the exercises that make it hardest to feel a particular muscle are the very ones that engage that muscle the most! So don’t abandon heavy, effective lifts just because you don’t 'feel' them as strongly as you would isolation or warmup exercises.