Hey there,
Here are the 3 things I’ve learned and/or expanded on this week.
It’s a heavy focus of training related topics for muscle growth this week.
Enjoy! Subscribe, share, comment, all the things.
Use Grips or Straps For Fuck’s Sakes
You want a bigger back, bigger glutes, bigger delts, bigger traps… but you’re still not fucking using grips or straps in the gym.
You don’t want a bigger back, bigger glutes, bigger delts, bigger traps… this is usually my response in these cases.
Okay, I’ll stop being angry now.
If you’re a beginner in the gym, you can definitely get away with not using any grip assistance and still get pretty great results. If you’re anywhere outside of a beginner lifter, you will benefit enormously by taking your grip out of the equation on certain exercises. You’ll stimulate and grow more in the intended target muscles.
As you get stronger, every single compound pulling movement that you do (ie. pullups, deadlifts, rows, pulldowns, etc) will eventually become limited by your grip strength. You’ll have to stop because your hands, fingers, and forearms gave out on you and not your back, glutes, or whatever the actual target muscle is.
But wait, what if you’re trying to get bigger and stronger forearms so you purposefully don’t use straps or grips. Here’s why this is probably not a valid argument:
- It’s a whole lot of wasted time and energy if you’re trying to grow your forearms with heavy deadlifts, rows, pullups, etc.
- You’re getting a way higher fatigue to stimulus ratio by going this route. You’re literally placing the fatigue on your back and glutes in order to grow your forearms.
- Your back, glutes, delts, and traps growth will likely suffer because of it. You fatigue them, but really don’t stimulate them a whole lot.
- You could just do wrist curls and get way bigger and stronger forearms than you ever would doing an isometric contraction on a bar during another exercise.
Just use straps or grips. It’s a simple, low-cost change to your training that will take you to another level of growth. Typically, I recommend grips over straps for simplicity, but they both work.
If you have performance or competition goals (ie. powerlifting, crossfit, etc) that don’t allow you to use grips or straps, well then you’ll have to follow the principle of specificity and not use them. The problem is that for some reason this gets touted out to the world as more functional. And everybody LOVES them some functional training. More on that topic another time perhaps.
A Structured Program For Better Results
Going to the gym with no plan, choosing your exercises, sets, reps, weight, etc… in the moment at the gym, and training what you feel like training that day. This is all well and good and It will get you results. Especially if you’re consistently getting in the gym. Using this approach, which is what most gym-goers are doing, you’ll end up with a good chunk of the results you would have gotten if you used a structured training program instead.
BUT there are some serious downsides to just winging it in the gym, especially if you’re serious about your body composition, strength, or performance goals.
Here are some of the downsides of not having a structured training program, and conversely some of the upsides of having one:
- Tracking progress is tough. When you don’t have a plan in place and you don’t track your workouts it makes it really tough to track your progress. You’ll have a pretty hard time knowing the training variables (ie. volume, load, relative intensity, reps) that you’ve achieved for an exercise previously. It makes it really hard to tell what works and what doesn’t work for you over time. Structure allows you to see your numbers from the previous weeks and whether what you’ve achieved in today’s workout is moving you forwards or backwards. It allows you to see over time what really works for you and gives you great results. It also allows you to see what might not work so well for you and actually inhibits your results.
- Too much variation. Variation is an important principle of training. But if you’re changing your exercise choices or the weights and reps you complete every single week you probably have too much variation. A properly structured training program allows you to plan for an appropriate amount of variation within let’s say a week (or the microcycle), but not so much that you go overboard with variation across the weeks of your program (or the mesocycle).
- It’s a lot more mental effort in the long run. A lot of people shy away from creating a structured training plan because, in the moment, it takes a decent amount of mental effort. But realistically taking the time EVERY SINGLE workout to figure out what you’re going to do and how much of it you’re going to do is going to take significantly more mental effort in the long run. If you take the time to create (or purchase) a training program, you actually take a lot of the thinking time out of the equation and you just do the thing.
- You’re more prone to inconsistency, skipping workouts, or skipping out on specific body parts or performance areas. It’s a lot easier to say fuck it, I’m not going to the gym today when you never really had a plan in the first place. It’s a lot easier to say, I’ll train my [insert body part you don’t like training here] next time when you show up to the gym trying to decide what you want to train that day. When you have a program written down that tells you exactly what you’re going to do and try to achieve this workout, you’re more likely to follow through and get it done.
- It’s hard to adhere to the principles of training. You get the best results when you adhere to the fundamental principles of training. It’s pretty tough to do while you’re just winging it. Specificity, overload, stimulus-recovery-adaptation (SRA), variation, individualization, etc… A well designed training program is literally built with these fundamental principles in mind.
- It might lead to overtraining, burnout, and increased risk of injury. If you’re the type to smash it in the gym every single time, not having any structure could lead you to overdo it in some sessions. Your soreness, recovery, and ultimately your results will be inconsistent. Purely anecdotally, you’ll also be more susceptible to aches, pains, and even maybe injury. A properly designed training program will allow you to progress without overdoing it and lead to more sustainable results over time.
- It might lead to undertraining, staleness, and lack of progress. If you’re of the opposite type as above, you might tend to take the easy way out. Your lack of structure could lead to really underperforming to your potential and ultimately your results will suffer. You might even get bored and quit altogether. A properly designed training program can kick you in the butt a little and give you some extra motivation to get in there and do the damn thing.
The Squeeze Or The Stretch For Growth?
If you’ve watched any kind of fitness content or have been in the gym for a while you’ve probably heard someone saying something along the lines of “focus on the squeeze” or “squeeze hard at the top” during an exercise. You might even hear advice telling you to pause in that peaked contraction position.
The squeeze I’m referring to here is the peak of the concentric contraction during an exercise. It’s the top of a chest press or biceps curl and the bottom of a lat pulldown.
For most of my training life, I’ve been really contracting hard and pausing during that peak contraction. It made a lot of sense intuitively. It allows you to get a huge, robust mind-muscle connection. It makes you FEEL like you’re training that muscle harder, putting it under more tension, and ultimately getting more growth out of the exercise. But is that really what’s happening?
There’s a lot of research coming out (and a lot still in the works) on ROM and muscle hypertrophy. Specifically research on whether shortened partial reps, lengthened partial reps, or full range of motion reps are better for hypertrophy. I’m not going to go in deep on all of this research here, but if you’d like to, I’d recommend checking out Milo Wolf’s youtube channel where he has PLENTY of videos and quality information on the topic.
Basically, a lot of the data is saying that if we emphasize the lengthened position, we might get more growth out of the exercise. We don’t really know why as of yet.
SO
You might be better off placing more emphasis on the stretch rather than the squeeze.
The squeeze isn’t inherently bad. We’re not talking massive magnitudes of more growth. But there’s definitely some rationale for focusing on the stretch over the squeeze. Personally, I’ve shifted most of my training to fit this notion. On most exercises these days, I control the eccentric all the way to a full stretch. I pause in the stretched position. I move fast, but with control during the concentric. I may or may not go to a full peaked contraction (ie. I may use a lengthened partial). And I typically don’t pause or squeeze really hard during the peak contraction anymore.
I’m not fully convinced that we should be cutting out the shortened position on all exercises all the time. And really… it’s not feasible to do for all exercises, like a barbell back squat for example.
When you pause and squeeze really hard during the peak contraction you might be adding unnecessary fatigue and getting less overall hypertrophic stimulus to the target muscle.
Try giving the lengthened part of the exercise more emphasis than the shortened part and see how this plays out with regard to your results.
That’s all for this week!
Peace,
Jamie