Welcome to the Get Fit Guys' quick and dirty tips to get moving and shape up.

My name is Brock Armstrong and I'm the Get Fit Guy.

When you start a resistance training program, your muscles don't change that much at first,

but your nervous system does, and a new study shows that you may need more than just

reps to make your strength training really stick. You need to deliberately train to strengthen

your nerves. But before I dive into the fascinating data from a study that was published

in the Journal of Neuroscience called cortical, cortical

spinal and reticulspinal contributions to strength training, I'll point out that this study

was conducted on macaques, not on humans, but as I'll cover later, macaques have a very

similar nervous system to humans, so this isn't a big stretch.

It was also a small study that only involved two monkeys, both female. But since the researchers

were studying the fundamental features of motor control, while they don't expect there to be

any difference in males. So, with those caveats out of the way, let's look at the results.

This study points to evidence that due to particularities in our nervous system, if we practice

deliberately, we can respond quickly and effectively to resistance training. And that's true,

even if we don't see a large

amount of muscle growth as soon as we start hitting the gym. Now, sports scientists have known

for a while that early increases in strength involve both building new connections and

eliciting changes to the existing connections between our brains and our muscles.

We call these neuromuscular connections.

Now, this process involves bundles of neurons and nerve fibers carrying commands from the brain's motor cortex

through the spinal cord to the muscles more effectively and efficiently.

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