Lately, I’ve been harping on the perfect resistance curve, mostly because I know the key ideal-exercise factors create efficiency of effort in the gym to build muscle quickly…
At my age, I don’t have time to waste with workouts longer than about 40 minutes 3 days a week. The lifetime finish line is looming…
If you’re new here, an ideal exercise is hardest near the stretch and easier as you reach contraction—for example, a dumbbell decline press…
Due to leverage, line of force and gravity, the resistance is heaviest at the bottom where the pecs are strongest and is easiest at the top where the pecs are weakest. Perfect…
That activates the most muscle fibers as you overload the target muscle in its strongest range—near full elongation.
So what about using resistance bands? Obviously when a band is stretched, the resistance is maximum.
And where does that occur on the range of motion? At contraction where the muscle is weakest. Uh oh…
That means the resistance curve with bands is the reverse of what it should be—basically backwards. Instead of the most resistance at the stretch point, you get the least—as in this photo….
If you’re striving for the most muscle mass with optimal training efficiency, bands should not be your first choice.
But if they’re all you’ve got to train with because you haven’t quite talked your wife into letting you convert the spare bedroom into a full gym, use them (I’ll explain how to make band moves better in a moment)…
That’s especially true if you’re just trying to strengthen the muscles for outside activities. After all, you’re training the target muscles with the most resistance where they’re weakest, not a bad thing….
I have a few good friends who train primarily with bands, like Bill in the photo above. He’s an avid mountain biker and rock climber, so all he’s looking for is additional strength to make him better at those sports and not lose his grip and—well, let’s not go there…
He’s not an old man striving for young muscle like me. So what would I do if I had only bands to work with to sculpt my physique?
Well, since we’re talking about chest, I’d first do pushups. The strength curve is great, similar to dumbbell decline presses, although the range of motion is lacking due to the hands being locked on the floor in a position outside the shoulders…
Still, a high-rep set, rest 20 seconds, another set, and so on would be my key pec-pummeling mass move. Three to four of those will sufficiently exhaust the target in its strongest resistance range for excellent muscle-fiber activation…
Then I’d follow with the band chest press Bill is doing in the above pic—but I’d tweak it for additional fiber recruitment…
At full-range failure, when I could not completely straighten my arms, I’d continue repping out through the stretch range, the bottom half of the stroke…
I’d even step forward to give the bands more tension in that strongest bottom zone, making those low-end partials more productive from a hypertrophy standpoint…
Jonathan and I coined the term “X-Reps” for similar bottom-end 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, just like you can do with many band exercises…
Those partial reps near the stretch point at the end of a set can get key growth fibers to fire 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 so you ignite an X-tra growth burst.
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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