When you saw the subject line, you probably thought, “Overtraining.” But something else has come to the forefront as an equal or bigger error when trying to pack on muscle…
In fact, many recent studies are verifying this critical mistake, and faulty logic seems to be the culprit…
Trainees think that working a muscle when it is fully flexed is the ideal way to stimulate growth—like contracting at the bottom of a triceps pushdown…
That desire to emphasize the flex during an exercise to enhance growth is a big part of the slow-growth problem.…
If you’ve been reading this newsletter, you know studies are showing that the contracted position is the LEAST important…
You primarily want to load the target muscle’s stretch position. That’s key to optimize size—and therein lies the big mistake: not emphasizing the stretch and stretch-position exercises. The studies are stacking up…
One looked at stretch partials vs. full-range reps vs. contracted-position partials on leg extensions. [Eur J Sports Sci. Pedrosa, et al. 2022]
Stretch partials, the third of the stroke where the muscle is elongated, built more size hands down.
Another study compared overhead triceps extensions, a stretch-position exercise, with pushdowns, which emphasizes contraction.
The stretch-dominant overhead extensions built significantly more triceps mass. (Euro J Sports Sci. 2022)
And another found that seated leg curls, which have more stretch, produced more than double the growth in the hamstring’s long head, the biceps femoris, than the lying leg curl. (Med Sci Sports Exerc, 2021)
This is something I’ve believed for a long time. Here’s a quote from the very first ebook I wrote with Jonathan Lawson back in 2004, The Ultimate Mass Workout…
In the peak-contracted position, the fibers are very bunched up, so much so that they can’t produce as much force/tension as when the muscle is in a more lengthened, [or stretched], state…. The main hypertrophic stimulus of any exercise occurs at the point where you reverse the movement with the target muscle elongated.
While we didn’t have everything right back then, we were on to stretch overload. Emphasizing stretch gave us some spectacular gains using very few sets for each target muscle.
Now, with the ideal exercise identified for each muscle, the path to faster muscle mass is even more clear…
As explained in Old Man, Young Muscle, those ideal moves are early phase loaded and late phase unloaded—you get the most resistance at stretch and the least at contraction.
Stretch is the key to ultimate hypertrophic reactions—NOT flexing at contraction.
Note: For a chart of stretch-position exercises for each muscle, as well as the IDEAL and contracted-position moves, see pages 42 and 43 of Old Man, Young Muscle.
Sculpt your perfect physique: Get the ideal exercise for each muscle, the best stretch and contracted 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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