The Best (Science-Based) Exercise Technique For Maximizing Muscle Growth
12-minute read!
You see it all over the internet. There are countless video tutorials and guidelines on how to perform exercises “properly”. A lot of them are really great, but A LOT of them are really not so great.
Exercise technique is a critical variable of your training if you want to maximize muscle growth. A lot of the technique advice out there focuses almost exclusively on how to make sure you’re in the most biomechanically advantageous position to lift the most weight, produce the most power, or move the fastest. This is great advice if your goal is to increase your overall strength, power, or speed.
We have to think about things a little differently when it comes to building muscle.
Muscle growth (or hypertrophy) is achieved primarily through muscle tension and metabolic stress (metabolite accumulation). Muscle damage is also a contentious mediator of muscle hypertrophy. Whether or not muscle damage has a direct or indirect impact on muscle growth, it certainly is at least a side-effect of getting the muscle tension and metabolic stress right, typically.
If these are the key mediators of muscle growth then our exercise technique should be mostly geared towards facilitating them to our best ability. How can we manipulate our exercise technique to get the most tension, all while staying safe and minimizing injury risk? We have to look at a few key components of exercise technique.
The key components you want to consider are position, ROM (range of motion), muscle action, tempo, and overall safety.
Position
Your position encompasses your stance, your grip width and hand placement, and the bar/machine/dumbbell position during the exercise. Here’s the thing: the exercises you choose should be based on the goals you have for growth. Exercise choice is a big topic that I will likely cover at some point, but this article is more about your general technique across all of your exercises.
Almost every exercise out there has variations to the position that you can employ. You can grip the barbell wider on a bench press or stand with a narrow stance and with your heels elevated in a squat for example. Some of these variations might add to the stimulus to the target muscle. Some might take away from the stimulus to the target muscle. Some might take away from the stimulus to the target muscle but add to the stimulus of synergist muscles (muscles that help with the movement but are not the primary movers). Some might change where in the muscle (ie. the middle or at the ends) the most growth occurs. Some might make your joints ache. Some might feel much better and smoother on your joints.
The position of your exercise technique is going to be very individual and based on your anthropometrics (limb lengths) and specific muscle growth goals. There are definitely general guidelines on how exercises should be performed and which positions you should be in to target the specific muscles you want to grow. For example, staying super tall in a barbell back squat with your feet narrow and heels elevated will put more of the stimulus on your quads than if you widen your stance, bare-foot, with a more bent-over posture.
The key thing here is to figure out the best way to do the exercises for you, which target the muscles that you want to grow the most. Keep track of how the target muscle feels in the gym (ie. pumps, mind-muscle connection), the soreness afterwards, and of course your growth over time as you try different variations and positions in your exercises.
ROM (range of motion)
Full ROM or partials? Let’s define what we mean by these terms.
Full ROM of an exercise would mean performing the exercise through as large of a ROM that you possibly can at each joint used during the exercise. Partial ROM of an exercise would mean only performing a portion of the full ROM. There are so many ways you could implement a partial ROM. Generally, you could perform a shortened ROM partial, a lengthened ROM partial, or one that stays within the middle ranges of the movement and never reaches the fully shortened or lengthened portions of the movement.
The research seems to be leaning towards using lengthened partials over any other kind of partial ROM. This would mean that you are performing your exercises mostly in the stretched position. But what about a lengthened partial vs. full ROM repetitions? There are arguments to be made on both sides and I think the jury is still out and there isn’t a definitive answer as of yet. I also think that it will be an exercise-specific decision (ie. flyes vs. barbell squats).
Generally, I like to tell people to use a full ROM and especially emphasize that lengthened part of the exercise. This means reaching all the way up until your elbows lock out on a lat-pulldown, performing your squats ass-to-grass, and going as deep as you can during an RDL to get the most stretch out of the target muscle under load.
Full ROM can allow you to get little mini-rests between reps which can allow for a greater number of repetitions during a set. A lengthened partial can allow you to keep tension on the muscle throughout the entire set and build up more metabolites (metabolic stress). Another advantage of the lengthened partial is that you are not expending the energy to perform the concentric fully which allows you to get more volume in the lengthened part of the exercise..
Whether you perform full ROM or lengthened partials just make sure that you are taking advantage of the muscle growth potential that a full stretch under load can provide.
A shortened partial is just for the ego lifters and maybe some athletes in particular sports. These are the half-assed bench presses above the chest or squats above parallel (in the context of hypertrophy training). Just don’t do that.
Muscle action
You have three main types of muscle actions that you are going to use in the gym including concentric, eccentric, and isometric. I know I know… it’s isotonic (which includes eccentric and concentric), isometric, and isokinetic. But for the sake of what most people have access to in the gym, we are going to omit isokinetic for now.
A concentric muscle action is the part of the movement where the muscle is resisting a load while being shortened. It’s the squeezing of the muscle. It’s the way up on most exercises like a biceps curl. squat, and deadlift. It can also be the way down on some exercises like the lat-pulldown.
An eccentric muscle action is the part of the movement where the muscle is producing tension while lengthening. It’s the stretching of the muscle under load. It’s basically the opposite of the concentric contraction.
Both concentric and eccentric contractions are part of almost every exercise that you’re going to use in the gym. There are very few exercises which only concentric or only eccentric muscle actions are employed.
You are stronger in executing eccentric muscle contractions than you are at executing concentric contractions. Eccentric contractions generally cause more muscle damage than concentric contractions do. Remember, muscle damage may or may not be a direct or indirect mediator of hypertrophy. This, in addition to lengthened partials showing greater muscle growth than shortened partials in most cases, may lead you to believe that the eccentric actions could provide more hypertrophic stimulus than the concentric actions. This reasoning is extrapolated mechanistically and through my own experience during my own training and coaching of clients. The research currently is not able to distinguish whether eccentric or concentric muscle actions are best for hypertrophy and there are conflicting results (see more with tempo below).
But really and practically, both concentric and eccentric contractions are important for muscle growth. Don’t neglect one or the other and try and try to eke out the gains from both.
Tempo
A 2-8 second repetition duration seems to be the best window of time when it comes to muscle hypertrophy. When you choose faster repetition durations (ie. 1 second up : 1 second down), you’ll likely be able to do more repetitions but with less time under tension per repetition. When you choose slower repetition durations (ie. 3 seconds up : 3 seconds down), you won’t be able to get as many repetitions, but each repetition will have greater time under tension. Overall, it will probably work out the same. The research seems to suggest that muscle growth will be equivalent either way.
My best advice on tempo as of now would be to complete the concentric as fast as you can with control (ie. 1-2 seconds) and take your time fighting gravity on the way down during the eccentric. The exact time will depend on the exercise.
Tempo is generally measured with 4 phases: (1) the concentric, (2) the transition from concentric to eccentric, (3) the eccentric, and (4) the transition from eccentric to concentric.
You might hear a lot of advice to pause during these transition phases on the movement. You might be told to really squeeze during the peak contraction or take a pause during the deepest stretch of the movement. Pausing doesn’t seem to be necessary, but if you’re going to pause you’ll probably get more out of pausing in the deep stretch as opposed to the peak contraction. It may increase your time under tension in the most hypertrophic position of the movement (the lengthened portion). It might also reduce the risk of injury (muscle strains or tears) and improve longevity because you’ll need to drop the load significantly.
Safety and minimizing injury risk
The people that get results over the long-term are the people who are able to stay consistent. If you are fighting aches, pains, and injuries frequently then your results are going to suffer significantly. You’ll want to perform exercises in a way that maximizes growth to the target muscle, of course. But you also want to perform exercises in a way that reduces the risk of injury.
Injuries suck and it’s impossible to fully prevent them from occurring. BUT you can take steps to minimize the risk of injuries and improve your longevity in the gym.
All of the above advice not only helps to improve how much muscle you grow from an exercise, but it also helps to reduce the injury risk of the exercise. That being said, if you are getting aches and joint pains from an exercise or while using these technique cues, you’ll have to make some adjustments. Start by decreasing the load, playing with your grip and feet positioning, and go from there. You may also find that some exercises or positions just don’t agree with your structure or joints and you might just need to swap them out altogether.
Later people,
Jamie
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