Dedicated to Your Physical Transformation
Mr. America/Mr. Universe Doug Brignole has some thoughts on my recent musing on stretching and stretch moves for mass.
He makes the observation that some muscles respond better than others to full stretch, and putting some into a full stretch can be dangerous, such as rear delts. Bringing the arm too far across that body can damage the shoulder joint…
And also lats. Here is Doug’s take… [Read more…]
Q: With all the focus on stretch-position add-on exercises, I’m wondering if simply doing freehand stretching [of the target muscle] after the ideal exercise would have similar mass-building effects. [Read more…]
My confidence in muscle stretch for more mass is growing. More studies continue to verify the importance of emphasizing the target muscle when it’s elongated to get the most gain bang from each set… [Read more…]
Q: Recently you mentioned using a pause at stretch on every rep of a set. You said you were giving it a try to see if it produced more muscle growth. I’m thinking about giving it a go. What’s your verdict?
A: To clarify, I’ve been using it on the first high-rep set of my ideal exercise—like dumbbell decline extensions for triceps… [Read more…]
Stretch-mediated hypertrophy has been a dominant theme in this newsletter for a while, but especially lately. That’s due to many recent studies pointing to stretch “overload” as being a key get-bigger trigger… [Read more…]
Anytime I see a study, especially a brand-new one, that confirms my mass-training efforts, I’m going to report on it.
A new one involved calf stretching to test for strength and, more importantly, hypertrophy… [Read more…]
Jonathan and I first began experimenting with Double-X Overload, or DXO, way back in 2005, the year after we introduced end-of-set X-Rep partials into our training… [Read more…]
Here’s an impressive shot of Ronnie Coleman at his elementary school graduation pool party. [Read more…]
All this discussion on stretch and ideal exercises had me remembering a study from my Iron Man magazine days that has significant correlation to efficient mass building… [Read more…]
Even way back in the ‘80s I knew that stretch-position exercises had unique muscle-building power. If I included them, I got bigger, no question about it. [Read more…]
