By: Paul Oneid

Maybe I'm alone in this, but...

I feel like the interpretation of this study is completely ass backwards.

For those of you unfamiliar, there was recently a study published that essentially equated the hypertrophy stimulus of lengthened partials and full range repetitions.

You can find the full study here

The narrative I have seen online is essentially, "awesome, we can do less and get the same stimulus."

Personally, I am a bit sick and tired of us finding ways to validate avoiding hard work. Not to mention, it's another complete lack of context within the paradigm of training... hear me out.

First, muscles have functions and actions. For example, the action of the erectors is to extend the spine, but the function is to stabilize the spine under load during movement. The action of the gastroc is to extend the ankle, but it's function is locomotion during gate.

Not training muscles through their full range of motion ignores this functional component and in my experience, leads to a glass ceiling of progression in the long term. A prime example of this is training the lower body through exclusively externally stabilized movements. Eventually, the ability to progress is limited by the ability to generate internal stability within the hips - a function that is untrained during these externally stabilized movements.

Next, we require motor control through end ranges to maintain resilience to injury and that applies to both the lengthened and shortened ranges.

So, do you want to know what I think? Of course you do, which is why you're reading this...

I believe that lengthened partials eliciting a similar hypertrophy response as full range repetitions is a phenomenal validation for including them within the training once full range of motion repetitions cannot be completed. Essentially, we would perform sets to full range failure, followed by partial range failure. That's right, including lengthened partials would allow us to train beyond failure and work harder.

This would provide us with a second failure point and the opportunity to accumulate more hypertrophy stimulus during a single set since we know that hypertrophy occurs to the highest degrees at close proximity to failure. So, we can now reach that point 2x within the same set.

Before you say it, YES I am aware that it would increase the demand to recovery of that single effort but guess what? If we track these partials, we evaluate performance over time and the changes to the physique, we could likely grow and progress with less total sets, assuming we're actually reaching failure with both full range reps and lengthened partials.

That seems like the best of both worlds to me!

What to you say? Reply to this email with your thoughts, or hop into the CCU Community and join the discussion with me!

Keep Raising the Bar,

Paul Oneid MS, MS, CSCS