Yuja Wang is a 35 year old pianist from China.
She started playing piano at 6 years old and by 21 she was already an internationally acclaimed musician. She just played Carnegie Hall.
There are many child prodigies in both piano and violin to come out of China. There is only one Yuja Wang.
Here is a clip of her performing her arrangement of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “The Flight Of The Bumblebee”.
Prepare for the best 1 minute and 48 seconds of your day.
I’ll give you a moment to pick your jaw up off the floor and tell you about another pianist, Martha Argerich.
Ms. Argerich is 81 years old and is from Argentina. She is somewhat famously known for having immense stage fright which has led her to cancel many performances throughout her long career. She is also well known for not utilizing any reference or sheet music while she plays. Rather she just memorizes and internalizes two plus hours worth of incredibly complex pieces which is very unusual in the world of classical music.
Here she is tackling some Chopin.
video preview--> (click.convertkit-mail.com) You don’t need to be a musician or critic or historian or even have much familiarity with classical music or the piano to recognize that both these artists are absolute world class players and performers. The top 1% of the 1%.
And even though their backgrounds, approaches, styles, age, education and experiences are very different there is one thing, to me, that unifies them.
Their ability to assign tension.
Watch a head-on view of any Olympic-level sprinter in slow motion. Surely you will see their arms pumping and every fiber in their shredded quadriceps muscles firing. But simultaneously you will see their facial muscles and hands completely relaxed. It’s as if their faces are watching “The Joy Of Painting with Bob Ross” while their legs are trying to get away from those night-walker zombies in “I Am Legend”.
Wang and Argerich are utilizing the same technique. There would be no way for them to get the power and dynamics out of their playing without very strong and deliberate muscular action. There would also be no way for them to play with that speed, precision and absolute flow if they weren’t also very in touch with their breathing and were properly relaxed.
Assigning tension properly is absolutely essential when it comes to training if you want to get the most out of each exercise in the gym - lifting the most weight possible while still moving athletically.
Where the tension and where the relaxation should live in your body is case dependent. Different movements will require different areas of attention. But the easiest way to start internalizing this concept is with isolation movements such as biceps curls or lateral shoulder raises.
The goal is to get some rigidity in the muscles that aren’t really contributing to the movement while allowing enough relaxation to allow the working joint to move.
So for something like the lateral shoulder raise, keeping your abdominals flexed and your lats engaged while allowing the shoulder joint to freely open and close will lead to a much more successful movement than if you simply allow your body to sway like a palm tree as you fling some weights out to the side.
When you start getting into more complex movements like deadlifts the assigning of tension gets more complicated as you have more joints involved in performing a successful lift. But actively gripping the ground with your feet, flexing your quads, setting your lats and bracing your abs will supply your hamstrings, glutes and upper back/traps with the structure and support they need to execute a great and powerful deadlift.
My favorite analogy when it comes to this concept is “you can’t shoot a cannon off of a canoe”. If the base of support isn’t engaged, the prime movers can’t do their work.
Finally, when it comes to even more complex movements - jumping, sprinting, cleans, push press - the assigning of tension continues to get even more complicated as it changes through the various phases of the movement. It’s one of the reasons that Olympic lifts and gymnastics take so much time to learn. It requires a lot of work for your body to learn how to properly alter its dynamics in order to run quickly, fly through the air or pivot around a heavily-loaded barbell.
This is something that, at some point in their “lifting career”, every athlete would benefit from working on. And proper cueing of this is one of the many things a good coach or experienced training partner can provide.
But if all this sounds daunting and confusing, allow me to give you a really easy place to start. When doing tricep kickbacks, barbell back squats, snatches or an all out 50 cal Echo Bike sprint, you will be very well served to relax your face.
Not only do your facial muscles not contribute to lifting weights, when you scrunch them up and contort them you are actually sending powerful neurological signals to your brain that say something like “holy fuck, we should probably not do this!”.
The best example I had ever seen of facial relaxation was a coach named Dani who used to work with us. She’s an incredibly strong person who I’ve seen hit a back squat double at 120 kilograms at a bodyweight of about 52 kilograms. If you don’t quite have a frame of reference for that just trust me when I say - for a non-professional strength athlete - that is an insane ability.
But even at those maximal weights, I never saw her facial expression change during the lift. Not an ounce of strain or any evidence of distress. Half the time she would be chewing gum while doing it.
At twice her size, I would lift the same weight and look like my face was melting off like I was one of those Nazi’s in “Raiders Of The Lost Ark”.
For years I consciously told myself to relax my face and now I’ve essentially internalized it. And that alone has helped my own lifting quite a bit.
For most people, simply making it to the gym regularly, performing meaningful exercises within a structured program and creating a habit out of it is where they are at in the process. And that is a wonderful and required part of the process.
But if you are ready to take it to the next level and give your training a bit more meaning and focus, it’s worth considering where to assign tension in your lifts.
I’m not claiming that it will instantly give you the abilities of Usain Bolt, Simone Biles, Martha Argerich or Yuja Wang, but it will drive up your results and make you a badass in the gym.
And, to paraphrase my Dad who used to tell me this about going to school: you’re gonna be there anyway, might as well try to learn something.