I’ve been a baseball player all my life and I’ve always used bat weights. I’ve never truly understood why they worked so well. Why does this effect occur?
In: Biology
The human body is both powerfully adaptable, and incredibly lazy.
if given the opportunity, it will perform motions that use the least amount of energy, for the sake of efficiency. However, if you go in with heavy lifting, the body says “fine ok, this is what we’re doing” and allocates the necessary resources to lift heavy things. it then adapts (temporarily) to that being the new “standard” and other things feel lighter by comparison.
However if you slack for a period of time, they will feel heavy again because your body has gone back into *power save mode*.
EDIT: not to say this is how muscle is built, it’s not. this is just about the temporary perception of things feeling lighter. Building muscle and actually becoming stronger overall is a different process.
A fun activity: jump on a trampoline for a half hour. then stand on normal ground and try to jump. Your body will have adapted to the trampoline as a temporary default, and jumping on normal ground you will feel like a ton of bricks.
When your muscles do work they swell and expand to increase blood flow and oxygenation of the cells. This helps the muscles lift more and not tire as easily.
So if you pick something heavy up, you get a “pump” that makes other things seem lighter.
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