Imagining Exercising's Impact on Muscle Mass

A new study by Professor Brian Clark, director of the Ohio Musculoskeletal and Neurological Institution was recently published in the journal Neurophysiology1, and it is nicely summed up over at PsyBlog2.
In short, 2 groups had casts put on their arms for 11 weeks. The group who was asked to imagine exercising that arm lost half the muscle mass of the group who didn’t imagine exercising.
This study reinforces earlier, more dramatic findings, that —absent a cast— you can increase muscle mass through visualizations. ASAPScience has a nice video summarizing this using material from the book The Brain That Changes Itself — by psychiatrist and researcher Norman Doidge, MD.3

  1. Clark, et al 2014 [↩]
  2. How To Grow Muscles Without Lifting Weights [↩]
  3. How You Can Easily Exercise Without ANY Equipment, or Even Working Out [↩]

By Dan Pouliot

A New Hampshire native, Dan received his BFA in Oil Painting from UNH; his digital works are in multiple permanent collections. Dan’s been a positive psychology student/practitioner, a blogger, an amateur Remote Viewer, and now a novelist. His passion for positive thinking sets the stage for his debut young adult novel, Super Human, published by PortalStar Publishing. Dan describes Super Human as The Karate Kid meets Escape to Witch Mountain.