How to Strengthen Weak Muscles Naturally

Pick up something heavy, get stronger—that’s the answer, right? While strengthening muscles seems like a simple equation, anyone who has tried to get stronger knows it’s not easy. We’ll break down how to strengthen weak muscles naturally.

There are three steps to drug-free, natural muscle strengthening:

Step 1 to Strengthen Weak Muscles Naturally: Reactivate

Activating a muscle is a familiar idea when it comes to working out, but our take on it may be unfamiliar.

Did you know that some of your muscles are only working at half power?

When you get hurt, your brain turns down the power to any injured muscles so they stay weak until they heal.

This shifts the workload to surrounding muscles until the injured muscle finishes healing. Then, the brain should boost it to full power again.

Surprisingly, this doesn’t always happen.

Instead, you get saddled with muscles that are “turned off”, or inhibited.

Inhibited muscles cannot be fully strengthened, as they can’t contract past about 40% of what they should be able to do. You can’t build stronger muscles if they won’t work at more than half strength.

The good news is, this chronic weakness can be remedied.

There are several techniques in chiropractic and physical therapy that focus on identifying and correcting muscle inhibition. Some of the “brands” you may find are:

• Muscle Activation (this is the one we do)
• Advanced Muscle Integration Technique
• Muscle Activation Techniques (MAT)
• Clinical Kinesiology

Working with a practitioner who can reactivate your muscles with one of these techniques is hands down the best place to start on your path to strengthening weak muscles. Plus, you should be able to get everything firing again pretty quickly.

Step 2 to Strengthen Weak Muscles Naturally: Reintegrate

Once your care provider has confirmed that your muscles are firing correctly, your next task is to get them all comfortable with working as a team again.

If the muscle has been off for a long time, the brain tends to forget about it.

Think of the brain like a coach sending an injured player to the bench.

After they return to play, they’ve been out of the game for a while. The team has kept winning without them. So even though the player is ready to go, the coach might want to keep the team that’s proven to win on the field.

Unless that healed muscle can prove it’s strong enough to be a valuable team member again, your brain will leave it benched.

What better way to prove the muscle is ready than to give it a chance to practice with the team? 

This is what we mean by reintegration. Practicing moving with correct technique helps reintroduce newly reactivated muscles to the brain and get them back in the game again.

There are a couple common ways to reintegrate muscles:

• Physical Therapy-type repetitive exercises that focus on one muscle or motion and work at them until they are easy and automatic

• Body mindfulness exercises like yoga or tai chi

With practice, Coach will clear the bench and have all your players running plays again.

In short, reintegration’s goal is to practice moving with every muscle until it‘s automatic. Really ingraining those neuromuscular pathways will help you see faster progress and longer lasting results.

Step 3 to Strengthen Weak Muscles Naturally: Recondition

This last phase is what people generally think of as “exercise”, and where they tend to start when they make exercise goals.

Work out six days a week, lift all year, never skip leg day…

These are great goals. But without the foundation of the previous two phases, it’s really hard to stay consistent. Inactive muscles work at half power (if at all) while your strong muscles get overworked.

This might give you flashbacks of dysfunctional middle school projects, and it has the same result. The hard-working muscles get burnt out, sore, and injured, while the inactive freeloaders keep complaining about how hard the exercise is.

It’s a lot easier to quit when your muscles aren’t working together.

If, however, you take the time to build a solid foundation by completing the first two steps, this last phase is incredibly flexible and can make exercise enjoyable.

Here are three ideas on how to make the most of the reconditioning phase.

First, find an activity that you actually like to do!

People often think that running or weight training are the best ways to exercise, but if you hate running, or your gym is 40 minutes away, you are much less likely to stick with it long term. (Even if your body feels good!)

A few popular options:

• Swimming
• Biking
• Martial Arts
• Dancing
• Pickleball
• Basketball
• Soccer
• Tennis
• Boxing

The important thing is that you enjoy it, it requires a lot of body movement, and it fits reasonably into your life.

Second, prioritize adequate nutrition, hydration, and rest.

(Remember, you’re like a house plant with more complicated emotions!)

Nutritious food, water, rest, and yes, even sunshine, are crucial to providing the building blocks your body needs to rebuild stronger after exercise. This is of course a much longer conversation, and we’ll go into more detail in another post.

Third, start small.

Overhauling your entire life all at once is too overwhelming.

Brute forcing these changes through willpower alone doesn’t work.

Instead, pick one item small enough that you know you can do it successfully. 

If your future goal is to walk 30 minutes every day, start by taking a 5 minute walk each day. 5 min is easy, right?

Then once you are able to do the 5 min walk for 7 days in a row, bump it up to 10 min.

If you miss a few days, don’t beat yourself up! Keep trying and remember that progress is a direction, not a destination.

People that take great care of their bodies are not the ones who never miss a day—they’re the ones who are great at starting again, especially when it’s hard. 

Bringing it All Together

Now that you have an idea of how to strengthen weak muscles naturally, start from the ground up.

Get all your muscles working at full power with reactivation.

Then reintegrate your activated muscles by retraining your body to use them again.

Once your muscles are ready to go, reconditioning can move along more quickly and completely.

It may not seem like there is much visible or measurable progress at first, but you are laying a solid foundation that your future self can build on, stronger and more injury-resistant than ever before.

If you still feel overwhelmed after reading this post and don’t know where to start, you’re in the right place.

The green button below will take you to our online booking site Jane where you can schedule a free Discovery Call. Between chiropractic, Muscle Activation, and targeted exercises, we’ve got the tools to help bring your goals back within reach!