Cut Through the Noise About Lengthened Partials | Strong Talk | Men's Health - video Dailymotion

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Cut Through the Noise About Lengthened Partials | Strong Talk | Men's Health

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00:00There's a lot of new training science, I think, out there now, too, especially with kind of,

00:04I guess, the length and partials thing. That's the thing that's very hot on Instagram,

00:07very hot on all socials right now. It's kind of the new way that we should be thinking about

00:10muscle building. I guess, can you explain a little bit about that? And then I want to hear

00:15what you guys think of it. Yeah, I'd be happy to. So, I don't know who the first researcher was

00:18to kind of explore this. You know, the first research I saw was on comparing, you know,

00:26shortened partial versus lengthened partial versus full range exercises. And what emerged

00:35from that was that the length and partials seemed to create the same growth response as the full

00:42range, and that the shortened partials were less muscle growth than either of the other two

00:49protocols. All of a sudden, we started looking like, hey, if you're just doing like the bottom

00:55of the movement and that's it, you get the same growth as doing the whole movement.

01:02So, maybe it's really just the lengthened part of the movement that's driving all the growth.

01:09And then some more research came along and started comparing stretched exercises where the heaviest

01:18or the hardest part of the exercise is in the stretch versus other ones where the easiest part

01:24is in the stretch. The first one that I recall with that was the incline bench dumbbell curl

01:29versus the preacher curl. So, with a preacher curl, as you're lowering the weight, the weight

01:36is horizontally moving further away from the elbow, okay? So, there's more torque the farther

01:42the – like if you're going to hold something heavy, you hold it in close to your body. You

01:45don't hold it way out here. It feels 80 million times heavier out here. So, the horizontal distance

01:52determines the amount of torque that's imposed by the load on your system. And the greater the

01:58torque, the more your muscles have to increase tension to match the torque levels. So, the

02:06preacher curl blew away the incline bench curl for how much biceps growth you got. The bicep is

02:14greatly stretched with an incline curl, but the weight is directly under your elbow at the bottom

02:20of the exercise. So, it's not heavy there. It's like you can just sit there and hang out with it.

02:25So, then this idea that the resistance profile needs to be matched so that the heaviest part

02:33of the exercise is when you are at the greatest stretch part of the muscle.

02:38And if you look at most compound exercises, that's exactly what happens, okay? As you squat,

02:43you lower yourself and your knees and your hips are horizontally moving away from where the barbell

02:49is. So, the more your knees go forward, the more torque is put on the quads and the more the quad

02:56tension has to increase. The more your hips sit back, the more your glutes and hamstrings have

03:01to create tension to match that torque of the load. A deadlift, it's the same thing. As you

03:07descend, your hips sit farther back. With a bench press, it's the same thing. As you lower it,

03:13your elbows are moving horizontally further away from the path of the barbell.

03:18Most compound exercises naturally feature this kind of resistance profile as you go into stretch

03:24and like standing up with the barbell at the top of the squat is pretty easy and most people avoid

03:30sitting down to the bottom of a squat because that's where it's hardest. So, it begins to kind

03:36of, I think that the problems with it right now is everyone's trying to research every muscle and,

03:42oh my, let's see if it works for the brachialis and let's see if it works for the tibialis

03:46anterior and they're doing these like kind of cheap studies where it's like let's do an eight

03:51week study where with your left arm you do the length and partial with the resistance profile

03:56and the right arm is going to be a short and it's like they don't give enough time and the stimulus

04:03is just kind of weird in some of these things. So, it's going completely overboard. I think

04:08in general though there's some really good take-home points that when you stretch a muscle

04:15and challenge it, that's probably the greatest threat you can put on it and most of the staple

04:22exercises that have been around for the test of time that everybody goes back to feature that

04:27naturally and that the things that most people do that never make progress is they just do quarter

04:34squats at the top and they use too much weight and they never go low enough, okay? Same thing

04:38with bench press. You go and you see everybody that gets no results and they're just up here,

04:43you know, and it's like, dude, that's not doing anything. Same thing with leg press,

04:47right at the top, all the plates, that's not doing anything versus somebody like for real where it's

04:52like boom, they bury that thing deep, they hold that stretch and they drive out of that stretch

04:58and it's like that's the real deal. Yeah. Have I been doing it wrong the whole time? Can I really

05:03grow my chest like this?

Cut Through the Noise About Lengthened Partials | Strong Talk | Men's Health

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