Q: You’ve been diving into the growth-promoting potential of movements that emphasize the stretch phase of a muscle’s range of motion. Your science and logic seem pretty solid and correlates with some of the exercises I’ve done that cause significant soreness in a target muscle group. Do you think this could be as much a result of micro-damage from stretching as enhanced fiber recruitment? I could see this micro-trauma also causing hypertrophy, but I was curious if you had an opinion on this. I remember the sorest I’ve ever been was from an overly exuberant dive into stiff-legged deadlifts. I know biomechanics says that it’s almost exclusively a glute movement, but hamstrings do get a significant stretch under load at full extension, which my soreness verified.
A: Here’s a quote from hypertrophy researcher Brad Schoenfeld, Ph.D., on a human study using stretch only, which produced impressive muscle hypertrophy (from Old Man, Young Muscle)…
At least some of the growth was due to the addition of sarcomeres in series (as opposed to in parallel growth, which is predominant in traditional training protocols). The authors speculate that muscle damage was a driving force in the growth process.
So, yes, damage appears to have something to do with growth, especially when no contraction is involved, as in the study. That’s similar to stiff-legged deadlifts for hamstrings—no contraction, although you are using weight.
But when the stretch is followed by contraction, as with seated leg curls, it’s apparently a combination of some damage as well as heightened fiber activation due to an injury-preventing emergency response…
Your nervous system senses danger as you move into a stretch with load, so it bolsters muscle-fiber recruitment to prevent injury…
You may be thinking that the bird-wing study that produced a 300 percent mass increase was passive stretch only; however, it included progressively increasing resistance, and the stretch was held for long periods—not very practical to sit on a flye machine for an hour holding the stretch.
And I’m not sure if the bird was completely immobile, so there may have been partial movement—like X Reps—by the struggling bird in the stretch position.
Tomorrow you’ll see the two best ways to integrate this info into your workouts for an impressive mass-kicking response without excruciating soreness that has you screaming and spraying toothpaste all over the bathroom as you brush your teeth.
New: Get the ideal exercise for each muscle, the best add-on moves for ultimate mass, complete 35-minute workouts, exercise start/finish photos, and details on building muscle fast and efficiently in Old Man, Young Muscle.
And you still get The Muscle-On, Belly-Gone “Diet” ebook FREE for a limited time when you add Old Man, Young Muscle to your mass-building library. Go HERE.
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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