A beautiful body is a wish for a lot of people. For some, the synonym of a beautiful body is having big and well-marked muscles. That explains why athletes’ bodies are considered a beauty and health symbol. After all, regardless of aim, the method used for growing muscles and stay physically strong is resistance training. Although it is thinking that muscle size is only used for aesthetic goals, strength and big muscles can help us to increase our longevity and quality of life. For instance, elderly resistance training has been decreasing the falls due to the weakening of the bones and muscle weakness. Also, the resistance training has neural support, main to the motor cortex, but to the prefrontal cortex either.

Resistance training is the main method used in order to increase some physical capacities, such as strength and power, which are very important for sports performance. Also, resistance training has been using to increase muscle size to the sport goals. Regarding the efficacy of resistance training prescription, some variables have been considering priority: volume, intensity (load), and velocity. Volume concerns to quantity of training, which might be the number of exercises, sets, repetitions, and time of training. Intensity is related to the load used during resistance training. Velocity is characterized by the displacement of weight in a determined time interval. 

Recently, brain stimulation methods have been used in order to investigate whether this strategy can increase resistance training performance. For instance, Kamali et al. stimulated used the transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) the motor cortex (C2, Cz, and C1) and temporal cortex (T3), and found an increase on one-repetition maximum (the maximum load which the subject can load; 1RM) and decrease the Rating of perceived exertion (indicative of intensity; RPE). On the other hand, Alix-Fages et al., explored the acute effect of anodal-tDCS on dorsolateral prefrontal related to the force-velocity relationship, strength training volume, movement velocity, and RPE. The results indicated the higher number of repetitions (volume), a lower level decrease of velocity along with the sets, and lower RPE responses. Thus, the tDCS might help to increase the volume of resistance training and decrease the perception of effort triggering to best results to the training


Source: Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00421-020-04417-2

Source: Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00421-020-04417-2