In a previous newsletter I mentioned range of motion and how a target muscle is strongest near its stretch point and weakest at full contraction…
Basically, when the fibers are elongated near full stretch, they can generate more force than when they are bunched up and crowded together in a flex.
So you get the most efficient—and sizable—muscle-fiber activation near the stretch point…
That’s why you should emphasize exercises with a perfect or near-perfect strength curve—hardest near the stretch, easiest at contraction, like the sissy squat. The Quad Father, Tom Platz, did a lot of those…
I also told you a boring story about me training at a Nautilus gym when I was in college. If you didn’t doze off, you may remember that most of those machines back in the ‘80s were designed with cams that put the most resistance at peak contraction and least at stretch—pretty much ass-backwards.
And many machines today have continuous tension—equal resistance all the way through the range. For example, most leg extension machines have the same resistance when your leg is bent at 90 degrees as when your knee is straight…
That’s not much better. So does that mean you should avoid them? Not at all…
As I mention in Old Man, Young Muscle, after you emphasize the ideal exercise, the one with the most resistance at stretch and least at contraction, you’ve now altered the target muscle’s strength curve to a degree…
That’s because you put the most stress on the early part of every rep of every set of that first “ideal” exercise. You’ve essentially pre-exhausted the stretch phase.
The weaker contracted phase hasn’t received much work…
So after the ideal exercise, if you choose, you can move to a exercise with resistance at the top for some unique fiber activation—for example, leg extensions after sissy squats…
And if you want to make that mediocre exercise better, try this…
When you fail on your last rep—because you can’t get to the top—continue repping out in the bottom third of the stroke where you still have strength…
Jonathan and I coined the term “X-Reps” for those partials because they EXtend the set. Our very first ebook back in 2004 was The Ultimate Mass Workout, the original X-Rep manual, a runaway best-seller at that time…
We made some spectacular gains back then with X-Reps tacked on to specific exercises…
And our surprising mass gains were no doubt the result of “patching” the strength curve of flawed exercises, like pulldowns, X-Repping at the top after full-range reps were impossible…
Those partial reps near the stretch point at the end of a set can continue to exhaust key growth fibers right at the target muscle’s strongest force-generating point on the stroke.
It’s a way to compensate somewhat for a bad or backward strength curve and get X-tra fiber activation.
Maybe if I would’ve had X-Reps in my bag of mass-building tricks at that Nautilus gym back in college to “fix” the strength curve on those machines, I would’ve been battling Arnold for the Mr. Olympia. Yeah, right.
Get the ideal exercise for each muscle, my complete workouts, exercise start/finish photos, and details on building muscle fast and efficiently in Old Man, Young Muscle.
Till next time, train hard—and smart—for BIG results.
Steve Holman
Former Editor in Chief, Iron Man Magazine
www.X-Rep.com
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